"New Intersections: Form and Meaning in Design," the current exhibit in the Brooks Stevens Gallery at MIAD is, as it intends to be, completely fun and very provocative. As consumers, we may not always understand the aim of product design when we're shopping for everyday objects like toothbrushes and potato peelers, but on some level we do understand what attracts us to a product.

Molding clay into containers to carry water or food inspired the initial use of this humble art medium. Yet through the centuries the art of pottery had transcended the functional to become both a decorative and collectible fine art. A new exhibit at Villa Terrace displays pieces of Norse Pottery created during a relatively short period of time, from 1903-1913...

An air of uneasiness lingers over the "Unmasked and Anonymous" exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and it has little to do with the severe, antiquated faces gazing at you from beneath glass vitrines. Perhaps it arises from the sense of history compressed into a rather tight space; perhaps it's the nagging conviction that the body of contemporary work presented here is somehow ill-equipped to bear the weight of all this history. The exhibit brings together the work of contemporary Wisconsin photographers John Shimon and Julie Lindemann...

  An extraordinary collection of artists will appear throughout the Milwaukee area this weekend. In Brookfield, the third annual Hidden River Art Festival returns to the grounds of the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts...

  Photography has long held a unique place in art. Sometimes it's conceptual, sometimes it's journalism, and the lines between art and documentary are blurred. When done well, photography is powerful. By its nature, photography is always documenting something and a narrative is implied. Even if you know intellectually that you're being taken for a ride via the photographer's visual trickery, you are drawn in anyway. Seeing, after all, is believing, even if a photograph very artfully bends reality. You willingly suspend disbelief...

Regionalism was all the rage among Midwest artists, especially in the years between the world wars. But in light of "Wisconsin Legendary Artists," a small but worthwhile exhibition focused primarily but not entirely on the first half of the last century, not all art from the Badger State could so easily be defined. The spread in style and content is wide among the paintings and works on paper in the exhibit.

Joseph Sinness' cross-hatched pileups of vegetation, bouquets of felines and swaths of lace converge with Erika Olson's cascades of organic material to reinterpret the pastoral and the prosaic in "Garden Variety," the Armoury Gallery's fourth exhibition. Olson's gouache and graphite works on paper conflate the palette and restraint of Suzuki Harunobu's feminine woodcuts with the sensitive, stylized surfaces characteristic of Ert’s fashion illustrations.

When Richard Sennett published his provocative thesis on the diminishing boundaries between public and private selves in the late '70s, things like reality TV and the Patriot Act were unheard of. Today they're incontrovertible facts that have further breached this boundary.

Milwaukee's rich heritage of fine art photography continues this week when the Coalition of Photographic Arts (CoPA), a new network of artists in the city, opens their "Second Annual Juried Exhibition" at Walker's Point Center for the Arts on Sept. 12. With sixty images in the show representing four states, CoPA strives to continually promote Milwaukee as a focal point for fine art photography. The 42 participating artists produced more than 140 intriguing entries juried by George Slade, artistic director of the Minnesota Center for Photography and contributor to numerous photography publications. Slade hosts a gallery talk . . .

To paraphrase Chicago's adopted art star and provocateur Jeff Koons, if his work doesn't reach viewers through the intellect, it'll grab them by the genitals. At the very least, the Museum of Contemporary Art's comprehensive survey of the artist's iconic sculptural works, new paintings and companion exhibit, "Everything's Here: Jeff Koons and his experience of Chicago," engage the viewer in myriad ways, not all of them prurient.