A new exhibition at the Ashmolean gives an education in the work produced by the precisionist artists of the 1920s through the 1940s, who used sharp, well-defined lines and striking applications of pigment to master the anxieties and ambivalences associated with modern life.

An exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum gives a sprawling overview of twenty-five intensely productive years in Latin American feminist art, gathering the work of 123 artists from fifteen countries who ranged across video, photography, installation and performance art, painting, film, sculpture, and dance.

A major exhibition at the Tate illustrates the competing and overlapping streams of painterly obsession in London in the second half of the twentieth century. It shows us how, in their different ways, painters such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, R.B. Kitaj, and Paula Rego redefined realism.

To criticize Araki’s photos—naked women pissing into umbrellas at a live sex show, women with flowers stuck into their vaginas, women in schoolgirl uniforms suspended in bondage, and so on—for being pornographic, vulgar, or obscene, is rather to miss the point.

An outsider artist might as easily be someone whose daily experience—as, say, a black person in the South—has kept that person from having any real contact with the larger culture beyond his or her immediate community. “Outliers and American Vanguard Art” gives us not only a new label—“outliers” instead of “outsiders”—but, more ambitiously, a look at how trained, and progressive, artists have responded to outsider art.