New and Old : In California, museums are celebrating and embracing Latino and Chicano art and artists.

A Tribute to Black Artists: Four museums across the country are featuring exhibitions this fall that recognize the work of African and African American artists, signaling a change in attitude - and priorities.

Bigger and Better : While the Covid-19 pandemic forced museums to close for months, cut staff and reduce expenses, several of them have nevertheless moved forward on ambitious renovations or new buildings.

Glyndor Gallery, Wave Hill, 4900 Independence Avenue, Bronx 71,. But the unglazed figure looks so simple, so much like a sculpture you might arrive at yourself, given a few hours and some clay, that you can’t help feeling you might recapture its maker’s intention if only you imagine hard enough. The original meaning of these incisions is lost, along with the cultural context in which they were made. The woman, missing head and legs but identifiable as such by two tiny protuberant breasts, is flat and angular, and incised from sternum to knees with an intricate decorative pattern. The man has something over his shoulder that, according to the wall labels, might be a sickle or something like a boomerang.

And a 7,000-year-old clay man and woman found, along with tiny altars, toy-size‌ houses and other primitive figurines, in what is now Hungary, are extraordinary. That said, though, the armor alone is worth a visit - a silver shin protector with a woman’s lugubrious face at the kneecap is particularly memorable, as are several discrete hoards of identical solid-gold ornaments. Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 15 East 84th Street, Manhattan. UPPER EAST SIDE ‘Ritual and Memory: The Ancient Balkans and Beyond’ It returns Milhazes’s expanding vocabulary to its original sources. This idea might have been better off resisted.

Upstairs from the paintings hangs one of the installation pieces Milhazes made by stringing up thousands of party decorations on hundreds of invisible threads. The show’s title, “Mistura Sagrada” (or “Holy Mix”), acknowledges their craziness and purity. They are great fun to parse: full of surprising repetitions and variations (consider the lower right corner of “Cirandinha”). These paintings are in a sense collages, but constructed as carefully as clockworks. Little aggregates of boxy shapes - all straight lines - conjure modernist abstraction from Mondrian forward, while each composition also contains a sprig of peasant-art flowers. Textile and interior design riffs are ubiquitous. Fields of gold-black-lavender concentric circles update Gustav Klimt’s backgrounds multicolored circles renew Sonia Delaunay’s. She uses several kinds of waves and scallops, all manner of stripes and dots. Milhazes’s patterns have been refined and multiplied.

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