Visual art

ROBERT FRANK AND TODD WEBB: ACROSS AMERICA, 1955 Two photographers, one American, one Swiss, who helped capture the United States at the critical crossroads of the postwar era, are the subject of this compelling exhibition at the Addison Gallery of American Art. In 1955, Frank, the Swiss, embarked on his crosscountry road trip that would result in his iconic book, “The Americans,” the result of a Guggenheim Foundation grant. Unbeknownst to him, an American photographer, Todd Webb, was on the road with Guggenheim grant money that year, too, but instead of driving, Webb made his trek on public transit, bicycle, and on foot, a sloweddown perspective in public space that made the journey itself a trenchant presence all its own. Through July 31. Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, 3 Chapel Ave., Andover. 978-749-4015, www.addisongallery.org.

THE WORLD OUTSIDE: LOUISE NEVELSON AT MIDCENTURY Nevelson, the flamboyant doyenne of American Modernism, was born just outside Kyiv and emigrated to Rockand, Maine, as a child in 1905. Escaping Russian antisemitism for America saved her first; art is what saved her next, transporting her from the backwoods nowhere of early20th-century Maine to New York City at midcentury, when radical new forms of art were taking hold. This show, at Colby College, just up the road from Rockland in Waterville, is as significant a survey as Nevelson has had in years. And you can double up in Nevelson’s hometown with the Farnsworth Museum’s “Louise Nevelson: Dawn to Dusk,” which runs through Sept. 24. Through June 9. Colby College Museum of Art, 5600 Mayflower Hill, Waterville, Maine. 207-859-5600, colby.edu/museum.

TOSHIKO TAKAEZU: SHAPING ABSTRACTION Takaezu, born in 1922 in Hawaii to parents of Japanese ancestry, made spectacularly expressive abstract paintings and textiles (she died in 2011). But her ceramic work is perhaps her most lasting legacy. At the MFA, a selection of dozens of ceramic pieces are complemented by her work in other media, paying tribute to her pioneering formal innovations and broadening the story of the roots of American abstraction beyond the Abstract Expressionist cohort of painters, many of whom were her contemporaries. Through Sept. 29. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 465 Huntington Ave. www.mfa.org, 617-267-9300.