There’s Plenty to See in Chelsea: 12 Gallery Shows Available This Weekend

1. The Kitchen through May 12; 512 W. 19th St., thekitchen.org. Chelsea’s busiest, most multimedia alternative space is presenting the outstanding “Charles Atlas: the past is here, the futures are coming.” It reviews the long, often brilliant career of Atlas, who has few equals when it comes to blurring the lines among art, documentary, dance and film. Eight video collaborations made from 1982 to 2016 with different choreographers dazzle with their different camerawork and editing — especially those created with Michael Clark and Yvonne Rainer. The centerpiece is “2003,” an enormous five-channel-video montage of Atlas’ dance films and various interviews and current events, like the Iraq War. The totality equals a crash course in New York choreographic history that reveals an ingenious symbiosis of dance and film.

2. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery through June 2; 100 11th Ave., michaelrosenfeldart.com. Claire Falkenstein (1908-1997), who, outside her native California, has never had a full-scale retrospective in this country, is generally known for her exquisitely excessive sculptures dating from the mid-1950s — welded metal tangles embedded with bright pieces of Venetian glass. “Claire Falkenstein: Matter in Motion” explodes this narrow view with nearly 50 works, introducing a relentless exploration of abstraction in early paintings on canvas and also curved perforated aluminum; sculptures of wood and glazed ceramics; and one fantastic mixed-media relief. Her dialogue with artists like David Smith and Jackson Pollock is but one fascination. More rewriting of art history, please.

3. Garth Greenan through May 19; 545 W. 20th St., garthgreenan.com. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s robust combination of the painterly, the political and much else has only gotten stronger, especially in the Trade Canoe series dating to the early 1990s. Three additions to it dominate her first show in New York since 2013. In them the big canoes are piled with symbols of conflict between American Indians and settlers, including skulls, schematic buffalo heads (which conjure arrowheads), the names of extinct animals and other texts, and portraits of Geronimo and George Armstrong Custer. Denser is better, as in “Trade Canoe: Ghost Canoe,” but everything exudes multiple passions: for art history, color, oil paint, endangered cultures and setting the record straight.

4. 303 Gallery through May 25; 555 W. 21st St., 303gallery.com. Doug Aitken has stepped back from the large video spectacles for which he is known to make a small one, “New Era.” It occupies a hexagonal space that alternates wall-size mirrors and video screens, often to great kaleidoscopic effect. It centers on Martin Cooper, now 89, who as an engineer at Motorola invented the mobile phone and on April 3, 1973, placed the first mobile-phone call, from a street in Manhattan. His voice-over proceeds from an initial optimism that the world might become one, to observations about aging and technology that seem more like a lament. Aitken’s camera takes in vast stretches of barren terrain and highway cloverleafs. He also manipulates images of the original phone’s keypad, creating patterns resembling housing developments that turn deliriously hallucinatory. In keeping with Cooper’s darkening view, there is a prevailing sense of isolation and anonymity, alternating with breathtaking beauty, especially of the earth itself.

5. Jack Shainman Gallery through May 12; 513 W. 20th St. and 524 W. 24th St., jackshainman.com. Hank Willis Thomas’ art always hits its mark, but the question is, does he aim high enough? “What We Ask Is Simple,” his especially ambitious show suggests a steeper angle. Seen in dimmed lighting, it occupies the gallery’s two spaces, and its most plentiful works are wall pieces on glass that lead double lives. Initially they look mostly blank — some have textures suggesting abstract painting, others have fragments of figures. Shine a cellphone flashlight on one or flash-photograph it, and crowded, sometimes violent vintage photographs appear. They show various civil rights protests — Birmingham and St. Augustine (anti-segregation), London (women’s suffrage), Nuremberg in 1933 (anti-Nazi). The shock is magical yet emotionally unsettling, reminding you of people’s courage in the face of oppression, history’s erasures, and the way the past recedes into darkness. The problem is that the images and the history they preserve gets a little lost in the brilliant, if slightly gimmicky, technique.

6. Andrew Kreps through May 12; 537 W. 22nd St., andrewkreps.com. Here, the German photographer Annette Kelm and the maverick Darren Bader have side-by-side shows. In “Knots,” Kelm continues to fuse advertising, Conceptual Art and Surrealism using odd juxtapositions and gorgeous colors. The show is a bit uneven; the best works put flowers or plants in strange company. In “E/either e/Either n/Neither N/neither,” Bader has mounted a small three-ring circus that centers on language, using books, soap, his father’s piano and his own poetry, which is printed on green crime-scene tape that has been strewn about the floor and Lawrence Weiner-style graphics splayed across the walls. As is usual with Bader, the general effect is obscure, irreverent and looks good.

7. Cheim & Read through May 12; 547 W. 25th St., cheimread.com. A few years ago, Ghada Amer, long known for translating images of women from pornographic magazines into embroidery on canvas, started applying these motifs to glazed clay. The dripping glaze affords her subjects a bit of privacy, like the dangling thread in the canvas pieces. The contrast between the two mediums here suggests that clay currently serves Amer better. She connects with its materiality and the images — appearing on free-standing sheets of curving wall pieces — are less photographic than before. This excellent development should encourage Amer to expand her imagery too.

8. Flag Foundation through May 19; 545 W. 25th St., ninth floor, flagartfoundation.org. Here you’ll find two thoughtfully dovetailed shows that span generations. “Painting/Object” presents the work of five young artists who work in and around painting in very physical ways: Sarah Crowner, Sam Moyer, Julia Rommel, N. Dash and Erin Shirreff (who also has a multimedia solo show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. on 22nd Street through May 19). They variously use sewing, stone, adobe, hemp and photography. Downstairs, an important precedent is honored in “Ellsworth Kelly: Black and White Works,” organized by Jack Shear, husband of the artist, who died in 2015. Kelly’s affection for black and white is well known, but Shear spins it afresh across photography, drawing, sculpture and especially Kelly’s relief-like paintings. “Gate-Board,” a combination of white board and black string from 1950 is, alone, worth the elevator ride.

9. Pace Gallery through May 12; 510 W. 25th St., pacegallery.com. Unlike David Hockney’s crystalline retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this show is an energetic messy update in which he pursues his new reverse perspective paintings glimpsed at the Met, partly by eliminating the bottom corners of the canvases. This tips some familiar motifs — the Grand Canyon, the hills of Yorkshire and Malibu, his blue terrace — toward the viewer as on a tilted plate. The reversal is clearest in “Still Life” and “Walk Around the Hotel Actalan” and diagramed in “Moving Focus.” What’s great about Hockney is the way he makes his ideas about painting so pictorially accessible. Two mural-size photographic drawings of the artist in his studio surrounded by many of the show’s paintings offer further delights in perspective.

Chelsea’s cup runneth over at the moment; so here are some of my other suggestions. The inimitable John Bradford continues his raucous faux-naive narrative renderings in “Hamilton, History, Lincoln and Paint” (through May 5 at Anna Zorina Gallery, 533 W. 23rd St.; annazorinagallery.com). The paintings of Angelina Gualdoni, inspired by Gauguin and pre-Columbian ceramics, show new growth at Asya Geisberg Gallery (through May 12 at 537B W. 23rd St.; asyageisberggallery.com). And Gedi Sibony has nearly filled Greene Naftali’sground-floor space with a large white cube turned inside out, using white-enameled metal panels familiar from kitchens. It’s titled “The King and the Corpse.” Its scale is regal; its funkiness sends up Chelsea’s prevailing cleanliness (through May 5 at 508 W. 26th St.; greenenaftaligallery.com).