Kymia Nawabi stood out at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space show. Her whimsical, yet somewhat disturbed drawings, paintings, and sculpture have the illustrative quality reminiscent of Tim Burton, giving characters multiple limbs or mix-matched bodies, and overlapping pattern over pattern –a complex world that begs to be dissected.

Unfortunately, we missed this one on the gallery hop last Thursday night in Chelsea, due to unexpectedly closed doors at Cheim & Read, but it is on the agenda for the next trip to the west side. The impressive roster includes names from Jenny Holzer to Kara Walker to Bernice Abbott, and of course, Louise Bourgeoise.

Maps! Maps! Maps!

We love the strangemaps blog, so coming across MAPCO (via the always-excellent Metafilter) really brightened up our Monday.

Rad aerial of Gallipoli inside.

The LATimes‘ Christopher Knight reports on the archive of the “magnetic, self-mythologizing” Frida, little-known and drama enducing.

Thank god the Museum of Animal Perspectives exists to post videos of what it looks like to walk through the woods from the top of a wolf’s head. But actually, this one is pretty good: Laughing Kookaburras

First installment of exposing art made by females. 3 litres glacial meltwater, 3 litres silicon, 3 turntables [2007]

I met Russell and Carl at their store, RePOP on Washington Avenue in Clinton Hill, and then stumbled upon (or, kind of internet stalked them until finding more) this seemingly outdated, but wonderful website of theirs: Prodigal Suns.

The Guerrilla Girls may have their own count in protest of sexism in museums, but art critic Jerry Saltz confronts MoMA on their gender-imbalanced collection and curation on the 4th and 5th floors, via his Facebook page. More after the jump.

“Public lewdness” at the Met gets us all hot and bothered about nudity in museums. Bodies and art after the jump.

In 1854, under pressure from Commodore Matthew Perry, Japan opened its borders to the West for the first time in more than 200 years. The concisely named “International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine” in Philadelphia in 1876 was America’s first World’s Fair, where pavilions from thirty-odd countries—including Japan—exposed 9 million westerners to the wonders of the “Orient.”

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Our room-by-room tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art continues with European decorative arts from 1850-1900. Come on in, the art history’s fine.

Found this little gem photocopied and folded while moving things around to fit a gem of a dumpster dive. Wish I could remember where it came from… This is some pre-Batali and Gweneth go to Spain Julia Turshen humor.