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From Warhol to Outsider art, don't miss these fantastic four shows this April.

Friday Mar 31, 2006.     By Joanne Hinkel

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Flipping the calendar to April gives me a little thrill. With thoughts of blooming tulips, warmer weather and the city springing to life, it's the month when I get off the couch, throw on a sweater and explore the city again. I've already bought tickets to the long awaited King Tut exhibit (opening at the Field Museum May 26) and am contemplating doing the same for the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit that opens at the Science and Industry Museum on tax day. Here are four more museum shows worth crawling out of the woodwork for in April:

"ANDY WARHOL/SUPERNOVA: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962-1964"
Museum of Contemporary Art
Through: June 18
Admission: $10 (suggested donation)

So Warhol has had more like 15,000 minutes of fame than 15. But we're still interested in giving him yet another minute. Focusing exclusively on the years 1962-1964, this exhibit pulls together more than 25 silkscreen paintings from his celebrity portrait and "Deaths and Disasters" series, the latter showing the aftermath of accidents as documented by newspapers. What makes this Warhol show fresh are not the paintings themselves so much as the ancillary materials: the newspaper clippings Warhol used to create the silk-screens; looped video footage of the infamous "screen tests" of visitors to the Factory (including Lou Reed, "Kathy," Edie Sedgwick and others) and a series of typically perplexing Warhol comments that pepper the gallery walls, as in, "The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine."

"One/Many: Western American Survey"
Smart Museum of Art (University of Chicago)
Through: May 7
Admission: free

As a Saturday jog along the lake proves, it's nearly impossible to avoid people in the city. A trip to "One/Many: Western American Survey" may be your best shot at escaping civilization without a plane ticket. In the 1860s and 1870s, photographers William Bell and Timothy H. O'Sullivan were hired by the U.S. government to document the western frontier, including the land that now comprises Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California. On display are 60 vintage prints from this body of work; don't miss the large-scale panoramic views, reconstructed for the first time since the nineteenth century. This Saturday's lecture, "From Survey to Style," will shed more light on these sublime scenes (April 7; starts at 4:30 p.m.).

"The African Presence in Mexico: From Yanga to the Present"
Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum
Through September 3
Admission: free

Providing some of the most relevant and educational programming of any cultural institution in the city, the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum makes an unheard history matter with this exhibit. Bet you didn't know that the first free African township in the Americas was founded in Mexico. In the first of a three-part series of exhibitions that make up "The African Presence in Mexico," curators Sagrario Cruz-Carretero and Cesareo Moreno present a range of works, from 18th-century Caste paintings to contemporary pieces.

"Accidental Mysteries"
Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
Through April 29
Admission: free

If you're not privy to the growing fascination with vernacular and found photography in the art world, then make way to INTUIT this month. Art collectors John and Teenah Foster have long been collecting amateurs’ snapshots, picking them up in antique shops, estate sales, and online auctions, but only the ones that bear mistakes such as double exposures and printing smudges. The resultant aesthetic is one more painterly and enigmatic than a “perfect” shot. Viewed apart from their original contexts, as most likely being in family photo albums, these snapshots provide fodder for our imaginations, which feel starved by popular media photographs that reveal everything and leave nothing to consider. On the flip side: what a crazy thought… that your dysfunctional family photographs could make it to eBay one day!