One of the fathers and pioneers of the American Urban Art movement, born out of New York City’s late 70’s and early 80’s graffiti heyday is the legendary artist Futura. Opening this weekend in Los Angeles will be a four day event and exhibition featuring the artist and his new works in what will be the artists first ever solo show in LA, titled KRUNK. The exhibition, which was previous listed to be in an sercret location has been stated to be held in Downtown Los Angeles on the corner of 6th and Main.

Futura, also known as Furtura 2000, has developed an international career over the past 30 years working as a prolific artist, illustrator, graphic designer, and custom toy designer. He as worked with companies such as Phillie Blunt, Zoo York, and Nike.

Curated by Thibault Sandret of Glam Trash Pop and hosted by Virginie Sommet’s Studio/Gallery 173 on Canel Street is the exhibition “Don’t Call It Street Art,” which will be on open to the public beginning this weekend on Dec 15th. The group show celebrates Street Art through photography, painting, collage, graphic design and live body painting. By taking the art out of its urban context and hanging in a gallery the work becomes legalized as well as institutionalized. Sandret hopes that by placing the work in the space of the gallery, people will allow themselves to slow down and take a look in a way that may otherwise not happen when quickly passed on the streets. Artists included in the show include Ogi, COL & Veng, Nathalie Hamelin, Iris Arnaud, Gary St Clare, Hugo Martin, Jake Dobkin and Alexandra Zsigmond.

Opening this weekend at the Richard Goodall Gallery in Manchester, UK will be a selection of posters, prints, paintings, drawings and etchings by Chicago-based artists Jay Ryan and Diana Sudyka. The two screen-print artists have been working in this medium since 1995, and own their own printing company The Bird Machine, in the Chicago area. Sudyka received her MFA from Northwestern University and currently works as a freelance illustrator and printmaker. Ryan’s work incorporates children’s book illustrations with hand drawn lettering. His designs have been used by The Flaming Lips, Sonic Youth and Stereo Lab among many others. His most ambitious project to date is “100 Posters, 134 Squirrels” which documents his artistic career over the past ten years. In regards to his work, Ryan has stated “One of the most important lessons I learned in school, from a teacher, was to lower my expectations of my work and be receptive to silliness, chance, and the development of a drawing in the process. Also, I think animals are funny.”

Opening today at Victoria Miro in London, in her first solo exhibition in the UK, Wangechi Mutu will be making a departure from her earlier collages and installations with their highly critical, dark and confrontational themes and stepping into a renewed optimism and positive energy inherent in this new body of work. The exhibition’s title Yo.n.I is derived from yoni, the Sanskrit word for “divine passage” or sacred space rooted in the worship of female creativity and sexual organ. With layers of visual metaphor, Mutu likes to force her viewers to question assumptions about race, gender, geography, history and beauty. Mutu received her BFA from Cooper Union, New York and her MFA from Yale University School of Art. The artist was born in Nairobi, Kenya and currently lives and works in New York City.

Lawrence Weiner is mounting a new body of work, “As Far As The Eye Can See”, at the Whitney Museum from November 2007 through February 2008. The artist uses words to serve as the raw material for his art. Words are spoken, sung, painted, printed, stamped on coins and manhole covers, put to film, just about anywhere. The text is intended to help people understand their relationship to the objects in their world. Weiner is one of the key figures associated with the emergence and foundations of Conceptual Art and has defined art as “the relationship of human beings to objects and objects to objects in relation to human beings”. Recent solo exhibitions of Weiner’s work have been exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Weiner has produced various films and videos, including “Beached, Do You Believe in Water?”, and “Plowman’s Lunch”. Weiner lives in New York and Amsterdam.

On view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Feb 2008, artist Kara Walker will be showing “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love”. The artist explores racism in the American psyche through large-scale silhouettes that tell a story as they spread from one end of a room to the other. Walker has created a repertoire of narratives in which she conflates fact and fiction to uncover the roots of racial and gender bias. Her imagery is haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation while depicting historical narratives of injury caused by the legacy of slavery. She’s been featured in Art21 and was in Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in The World, Artists and Entertainers in 2007. Walker received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She now lives in New York and is on the faculty of the MFA program at Columbia University.

In a new body of work titled A Castle Dark (For Cathy), artist Hilary Wilder tells the story of Cathy Smith, a former groupie to The Band also known for her troubled relationship with singer Gordon Lightfoot and her implication in the drug-related death of John Belushi. The series of paintings are constructed from the visual details of her life while paying homage to Canadian landscape painter, Tom Thomson. Wilder received a B.A. in Studio Art from Bates College and an M.F.A. in painting at the University of Wisconsin. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts. Wilder is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. The artist is also taking part in a group show titled “The Sirens’ Song” opening October 11 at Rubin Center in El Paso.