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Use your smartphone to access self-guided tours of the outdoor public art sited by UT's award-winning Landmarks program any time you feel like it. BONUS: There's also a free, docent-led tour starting at Marc Quinn's "Spiral of the Galaxy" (1501 Red River) on Sun., Jan. 8, 11am.

Have we mentioned how we can't even with this Phillip Niemeyer and his Northern-Southern gallery? And that we mean that in a good way? Listen: While the artistic takeover called Baton continues in the N-S venue on East 12th, here comes another wide-ranging project set in and around the city itself, a group show of paths and directions considered as art experience – installed outdoors, in semi-wild public spaces across Austin and beyond. This show encompasses "audio tours, trails, portals, sculpture, digital media, instructions, new landmarks, wayfinding marks, sibyls, remote running sessions, and care stations." And the artists providing this panoply of discovery? Adreon Denson Henry, Alyssa Taylor Wendt, Amanda Julia Steinback, Amy Scofield & Lisa Hallee, Emma Hadzi Antich, Laura Latimer, Chris Lyons, Ted Carey, Sean Ripple, Staci Maloney & Michelle Smolensky, Tammy West, and Zoe Berg. Recommended. Five stars. 10/10. Get out of the house and remap your territory!

Visit mid-century Hollywood without leaving Austin through an up-close view of these Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio assets. This first-ever public viewing of 12 historic Golden Age of Film backdrops provides a look into the nearly lost art of hand-painted Hollywood scenic art. Bonus: Re-creations of other backdrops in the collection, as painted by UT scenic art students training with Karen Maness. And, look: Robert Faires reports on the show right here.

Inspired by the Mexican American Cultural Center's annual La Mujer celebration – and by the first feminist of the New World, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz – this online group exhibit is curated by April Garcia and features womxn-identifying and nongender-specific artists whose artwork is tied to activism, feminism, cultural. and gender identity storytelling, environmental protection, and socioeconomic parity.

This is a retrospective of the creative journey that painter Kevin Greer started alone inside his studio during the lockdown that continued through this past month. You want to see some vivid, multicolored abstractions like strategically shattered shards of somebody's lysergic and fire-marked dreams? Then, says Brenner, you should see this.

This latest installation by Colin McIntyre balances subtle extremes of light and sound, featuring a constructed setting that's a rhomboid chamber of red on red. Into this incarnadine vault the sculptor has engineered neon light and sound that plays through cymatic devices to oscillate fluids at the frequency of a specific tone. Note: This is an in-person event inside the gallery, for one to two people at a time, with a strict face mask and social distancing policy.

This local treasure of a venue, run by those Contemporary Austin folks who also bring us the Jones Center shows Downtown, is all about the outdoors – which is perfect for these trickily navigated times of ours, n'est-ce pas? Recommended: Stop by and breathe in the air, enjoy the lawns and gardens and the many examples of world-class sculpture arrayed across the property, and (as Frankie used to say) r-e-l-a-x.

Deanna Miesch's new gallery on the Eastside debuts with an exhibition of drawings and sculptural works by Austin's Stephen Daly.

Mexic-Arte Museum presents an exhibition of selections from the Juan Antonio Sandoval Jr. collection, an array of work that is considered one of the most important Latinx art collections in the United States.

New paintings from Austin's Andy St. Martin. "Like all my paintings, collage, and drawings," says the artist, "these new ones are a chain reaction of reactions, reflections, decisions (about them, paintings, and life and light, literally). They're my activity, evaluation, commitment incarnate, and contract with myself." Ah, "commitment incarnate," we love that. See what it means in this bright painterly context: Schedule a visit or check out the gallery's front room that's illuminated nightly, 6-10pm, through March 22. Need we say more?

Featuring works by Robert Jackson Harrington, Annie Miller, Liz Rodda, and Tammie Rubin, "staycation iv: (un)promised potential" explores concepts that generate and change through repetition, contradiction, and fictional narratives. Note: In conjunction with this exhibition, MASS Close Encounters will offer virtual programming with the artists via their Instagram.

Leo Steinberg's wide-ranging scholarship addresses such canonical artists as Michelangelo Buonarroti, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens, Pablo Picasso, and Jasper Johns. Here the Blanton presents selections from the scholar's vast collection – an impressive array of highlights from the European printmaking tradition.

Austin-born and internationally acclaimed, Deborah Roberts critiques notions of beauty, the body, race, and identity in contemporary society through the lens of Black children. (Her first solo museum presentation in Texas, "I'm," is part of The Contemporary Austin's participation in the Feminist Art Coalition – a nationwide initiative of art institutions to generate awareness of feminist thought, experience, and action through exhibitions and events.) Norway's Torbjørn Rødland works with analog technology and readymade spaces to create photographs that render the everyday uncanny. His images blend the cool, seductive aestheticism of commercial and fashion photography with the layered complexity of a conceptual practice, resulting in ambivalent perspectives that both attract and repulse.

This place, ah, it's one of our favorite places in the entire city; and of course they're properly corona-closed. But check 'em out online right now – it's a rich, wonder-filled website – to whet your appetite for when things get back to … uh … are we still calling it "normal," these days?

Emerging from the chaos of the pandemic and the fight for social justice, this exquisite show of paintings by Anne Siems explores "a shift in consciousness to a softer and more playful way of being. The women depicted are strong yet vulnerable; they are both a hope and a reflection of our world. In this work and in her practice, Siems has found strength and patience to be the soul." We heartily concur.