Critic’s Picks : Art

While we’re waiting for the season’s indisputable Big Event--the Dec. 16 opening in Brentwood of the billion-dollar Getty Center--plenty of provocative art will be coming our way. Joining the Robert Gober extravaganza currently installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art (through Jan. 4), a retrospective of photographs by New York’s Cindy Sherman (Nov. 2-Feb. 1) will examine one of the most important artists to emerge in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art continues its string of surveys of major L.A.-based artists at mid-career with the internationally esteemed video installations of Bill Viola (Nov. 2-Jan. 11).

Farther afield, the San Diego-Tijuana border region is home to inSITE97 (Sept. 26-Nov. 30), in which four dozen North and South American artists will create temporary projects in a variety of public spaces, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art gives a welcome platform to a lesser-known Mexican Modern painter in “The True Poetry: The Art of Maria Izquierdo” (Sept. 27-Dec. 28).