Andrea K. Scott: Winter Art Preview: The New Yorker Radical is beautiful in the art of Carrie Mae Weems, whose pointedly lyrical photographs, films, and videos reveal hard and tender truths about race and gender. In her staged scenes and appropriated pictures, which often incorporate words, Weems, now sixty, insists that history and identity are constructions as well. The African-American artist, who was recently awarded a MacArthur fellowship, has said, "Getting rid of that stereotype so that this person's humanity actually shines through, that's the project." The Guggenheim surveys her three-decade-long career, beginning Jan. 24. On March 7, the always divisive Whitney Biennial opens, organized by Michelle Grabner, an artist and an influential professor at the Art Institute of Chicago; Anthony Elms, a young curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and Stuart Comer, who was just named chief curator of media and performance at MOMA. This is not the first time the Whitney has assigned the biennial job to a team: the mishmash of 2000 was conceived by a group of six. What is new is the decision to allocate a separate floor to each curator. Smart money would bet that the approach results in a hat trick. It's hard to believe Paul Gauguin started out as a stockbroker, but, then, his life was marked by metamorphosis. He went from being a collector of Impressionism to becoming one of history's most important (and popular) painters, moving from Paris to Pont-Aven, and from France to the South Pacific. But Gauguin's most revolutionary contribution to art may be the experimental prints and transfer drawings he made between 1889 and 1903, the year he died. More than mere innovations in the mediums of woodcut and monotype, these works collapse distinctions between original and copy. MOMA organizes the first major show on the subject, opening March 8. ♦