The non-conformist lifestyle and camaraderie associated with board sports have nurtured a "skate" aesthetic. The third annual Modart Festival featured 120 artists in a pop-up exhibition hung in an abandoned fruit market on the edge of town.

A sensual adventure, the exhibit "Realm of the Senses," now running at the James Cohan Gallery, stimulates your sensory organs with a subtle mastery that leaves you physically and mentally aroused.

Su-Mei Tse has thrown her socially charged art onto the floor in the form of a rug. Applying the minimalist tradition of using industrial materials, Tse acquired a large wool carpet, had it professionally printed and then cut it into the shape of a maze.

Greer’s dolls, ingeniously constructed out of soda bottles, coat hangers, umbrella hinges, panty hose, layers of paint, and glass eyes obtained from a taxidermy shop, have a surreal yet jarring vitality. Their skins are marked with stitching and other surgical handiwork, as she generally put each figure through several incarnations on its way to completion.

Seonna Hong's first New York solo exhibition Animus so touched collectors with its emotional insight that the show at 5BE Gallery sold out before it even opened.

The works on display fall into the category of social realism and date from the 1940s and 50s, when abstract theorists dominated American painting. An African-American, Biggers was born and raised in the segregated South. Educated in art, he had a Ph. D. from Penn State; well aware of abstraction, Biggers chose instead to illustrate the outward struggles and inner strengths he witnessed in his America.

Collectors are swarming all over her geometric abstractions, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Tate Museum have just acquired the Cuban-born painter’s work. Now 93- years old, Carmen Herrera toiled for decades in near obscurity when nobody knew her name.

Thomas Alleman’s urban landscapes convey the pulsating energy and sensual excitement of city life. With an eye for the visual rhythms and geometry of buildings, highways and parks, his photographs transform ordinary structures and events into emotionally charged images of modern life.

If you had come for a slideshow of eye candy or hints at who might be in the 2008 Whitney Biennial -- of which Shamim is a curator -- forget about it. Among the art-world hard core, eye candy is now hard candy.