On March 12, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles opens "Kerry James Marshall: Mastry," the artist's first retrospective. Marshall is one of the most significant chronicler's of the American experience, especially the African-American experience. For 35 years he has worked to add black people and black culture to a Western art historical canon that is mostly built of white faces and stories. The exhibition was curated by Dieter Roelstraete, Helen Molesworth and Ian Alteveer. The exhibition catalogue was published by Skira Rizzoli.

Episode No. 276 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features historian and author Jane Kamensky and curator Anne Ellegood.

Kamensky is the author of "A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley." The book is a new biography that places one of early America's best and most important artists within the context of the political and revolutionary events of his time -- and details how Copley and his family were actors in them. Amazon offers it for $20 in hardcover and at $16 for Kindle.

Kamensky is a professor of history at Harvard University and the director of the Schlesinger Library. She is a historian of early America and the Atlantic world.

On the second segment, Hammer Museum curator Anne Ellegood discusses her new exhibition "Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World." Ellegood's retrospective is the first major Durham show in the United States in over 20 years. 

Durham came to prominence as an artist in New York City in the 1980s. His work has consistently addressed questions of identity, colonialism and the inseparability of identity from politics in the United States. The exhibition is on view at the Hammer through May 7, when it will travel to the Walker, the Whitney and to the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The show's thorough catalogue was published by DelMonico Prestel.

Episode No. 275 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curators Sharon Hecker and Tamara Schenkenberg and was taped live at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis.

Hecker and Schenkenberg are the co-curators of "Medardo Rosso: Experiments in Light and Form," which is at the Pulitzer through May 13. The exhibition is the first broad survey of Rosso's work in an American museum in over fifty years. (In 2014-15 the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York presented this Rosso installation.) It features nearly 100 works, including sculptures, drawings and photographs. The exhibition's catalogue is available for free from the Pulitzer for a $7 PayPal-administered shipping charge.

Rosso is an Italian artist who spent much of his career in France. His sculptures of heads and figures in wax, plaster, and bronze are key pivots between an era of monumental bronze sculpture, realist and impressionist sculpture and ultimately modern art.

Episode No. 274 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artists Sarah Oppenheimer and Richard Misrach.

This weekend the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in Columbus debuts "Sarah Oppenheimer: S-337473," an exhibition of a newly commissioned work developed  for the Wexner's Peter Eisenman-designed building. Oppenheimer created her new work as a two-year-long Wexner Center Artist Residency Award recipient, during which she collaborated with OSU's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering to develop a patent-pending pivot mechanism that allows this new work to rotate at a 45-degree angle. The exhibition opens on Saturday, February 4 and will be on view through April 16. As soon as images of the new work are available, probably on or around February 7, we'll add them to this post.

Sarah Oppenheimer is an artist who creates installations that engage with both architecture and space. She's previously made work for the Perez Art Museum Miami (on view through April 30), the Kunsthaus Basel, the Rice University Art Gallery, the Queens Museum, and the Saint Louis Art Museum. A project she is developing for Mass MoCA will debut in 2019. Oppenheimer has also created a permanent installation at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Multiple views of all her installations are on her website.

On the second segment, the re-airing of a 2016 segment with Richard Misrach on his "Border Cantos," a book and exhibition on which he has collaborated with Mexican composer and performer Guillermo Galindo. Since 2004, and especially since 2009, Misrach has been making pictures along the 2,000-mile-long United States border with Mexico, the latest investigation of American deserts that make up what Misrach calls his Desert Cantos series. As Misrach traveled the borderlands, he accumulated discarded objects such as water bottles, backpacks, clothing and shotgun shells and turned them over to Galindo, who made that material into instruments and who then performed on them. The book, "Border Cantos," is out from Aperture; Amazon offers it $45, a forty percent discount.