11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9400) - "Claes Oldenburg: The Street and the Store." 22-25 Jackson Ave., Queens (718-784-2084) - "Michelangelo Frammartino: Alberi." Fifth Ave. at 89th St. (212-423-3500) - "Gutai: Splendid Playground." The Vietnamese-born conceptualist exhibits more than three thousand objects, neatly arranged on simple wooden shelves, collected by the East Village painter Martin Wong (1946-99) and his mother, Florence Wong Fie. Most of them were acquired in San Francisco, where Wong spent the last years of his life, before succumbing to AIDS. Knickknacks - Daffy Duck figurines, salt and pepper shakers, tourist souvenirs, ceramic Buddhas - are interspersed with more valuable finds, including Chinese scroll paintings. Several graffiti-related objects nod to Wong's involvement in street art. Most touching are the gifts to his parents, such as small paintings of golf clubs for his father and a multi-armed statuette that he gave to his mother (who helped Vo organize the exhibition), with the dedication "To a little lady that always has her hands full." Through May 22. 1040 Grand Concourse (718-681-6000) - "Joan Semmel: A Lucid Eye." Through June 9. Open Thursdays through Sundays, 11 to 6, and Friday evenings until 8. 15 W. 16th St. (212-294-8301) - "Passages Through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War." Through Aug. 11. Open Mondays, 5 to 8, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, 11 to 5, Wednesdays, 11 to 8, and Fridays, 11 to 2:30. 225 Madison Ave., at 36th St. (212-685-0008) - "Degas, Miss La La, and the Cirque Fernando." 44-19 Purves St., Queens (718-361-1750) - "Better Homes." Through July 22. Open Thursdays through Mondays, 11 to 6. In previous shows, Gall has nuzzled up close to the natural world, photographing weeds from a worm's-eye view or a spiderweb from the vantage point of a cautious fly. Her new work tends to pull back and observe from a distance, often gazing up at the sky to capture clouds, planes, or cruising dragonflies. There are several fine individual pictures here, but most works are arranged in diptychs or triptychs of vertical panels that suggest scrolls or screens. Flight is the most apparent theme, and the multi-part pieces combine images of soaring, floating, and gliding with an appealing, poetic ease. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. That's one message viewers might glean from these sombre new monochrome paintings, which update Gonzales's longtime interest in crowd scenes by replacing the people with cars. The palette is pure Motor City - muted teal, stone beige, gray. The nearly identical images (which share DNA with Warhol's silk screens, although they're painted by brush) are based on snapshots that Gonzales took in a sprawling lot in California from slightly different vantage points at different times of day. The results have a stifling, repetitive anonymity and a queasy déjà-vu quality. On the bright side, these portraits of paradise lost might make you head for the bike lane. As both a teacher and a photographer, Watkins (1884-1969) was a key, if little known, figure in photography's transition, in the early twentieth century, from painterly pictorialism to a tougher, sleeker modernism. This excellent overview of her career, which petered out in the mid-nineteen-thirties, includes portraits, landscapes, and two terrific female nudes. But Watkins's still-lifes, a number of which were made as advertisements, are her most distinctive work. Whether her subjects are poppies, gourds, glassware, or dishes in a sink, she frames them with striking clarity and warmth, casting a fond and thoroughly engaging eye on ordinary domesticity. Through May 11. Through May 25. Through June 15. ELENA SISTO: Bookstein, 138 Tenth Ave., at 18th St. 212-750-0949. The New York artist became an art-world sensation while still in high school, in the mid-nineties, thanks to works she shot on a Fisher-Price toy video camera. In the new, sixteen-minute-long "War Credits," Benning applies her signature D.I.Y. style to obliquely political ends. She recorded and re-recorded the closing credits from three Hollywood war movies - "G.I. Jane," "Black Hawk Down," and "Full Metal Jacket" - on VHS tapes until they were no longer legible. Titles detonate in bursts of light and disintegrate into blurry white lines, accompanied by pop songs (notably the Rolling Stones" "Paint It, Black"). The video is flanked by two abstract paintings on wood panels - one red and white, the other blue and white - as if to signal a nation divided. Callicoon, 124 Forsyth St. 212-219-0326. M. C. Escher meets Eugene Debs in this madcap installation with sinister undertones. Visitors enter through a series of arches, designed to suggest the silver cases of the MacBook Pros. A nearby monitor reveals an image of the viewer caught in an endless succession of screens - a digital hall of mirrors. A maze, made of panels displaying images of iPods and iPhones, contains hidden cameras that place portraits of gallerygoers into advertisements for the devices. Underlying the obvious messages - our every move is being subsumed by digital culture - is a subtler call for fair labor practices. The blue fabric that unfurls throughout the space issues from a hand-operated knitting machine, and miniature anti-suicide nets refer to the less than optimal working conditions at Apple's factories in China. Swiss Institute, 18 Wooster St. 212-925-2035. Working with blocks, bands, and gestural swirls of vibrant color, the German photographer constructs abstractions influenced by color-field painting and graphic design. His photograms, composed of juxtaposed and layered colored gels, have the cool glow of light boxes. Echoes of Mark Rothko, Gene Davis, and Kenneth Noland don't entirely make up for what looks like corporate-office abstraction, but Otten's colors give the work a nice, sometimes acidic bite. Overlapping and bleeding with bright swatches of red, blue, and green, his magentas, curdled yellows, dusty pinks, and muddy browns help subvert bland beauty. Borden, 560 Broadway, at Prince St. 212-431-0166. "PAUL THEK AND HIS CIRCLE IN THE 1950S": Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, 26 Wooster St. 212-431-2609.