After getting all excited by yesterday morning's announcement of the New Museum's new international triennial for emerging artists, we were plunged into the eerie, postapocalyptic world of the musem's "After Nature" exhibition, which opens tomorrow and runs through September 21. "The future it presents is pretty grim," said director of exhibitions Massimilano Gioni, who organized the show with curatorial assistant Jarrett Gregory. Another tip-off: the taxidermied headless horse (a 2007 work by Maurizio Cattelan) stuck to the wall. The exhibition aims to "survey a landscape of wilderness and ruins, darkened by uncertain catastrophe" (surely the best kind), and so Cattelan's decapitated horse shares the museum's cathedral-like fourth floor space with Zoe Leonard's 70-foot "Tree" (1997), hobbled and propped up on crutches, and the 1894 "Celestographs" (sheets of photographic paper left on the windowsill overnight) of Swedish writer August Strindberg, a wild-haired posterboy for doom.

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As followers of the official UnBeige Twitter feed learned only minutes after it was announced at a press briefing this morning, New York's New Museum is launching a major international triennial for emerging artists. Opening next spring, the triennial's first incarnation will be called "Younger Than Jesus," a title inspired by the many enduring changes in art and history wrought by young people. The exhibition will occupy the entire New Museum, the mesh-skinned stack of blocks on the Bowery designed by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA.

"This will be the first recurring international exhibition in New York City devoted to emerging artists around the world," said New Museum director Lisa Phillips at today's press briefing. Focusing on artists who are under the age of 33, "Younger Than Jesus" will "analyze how generations emerge and produce work today," noted Massimiliano Gioni, director of special exhibitions at the museum and a member of the curatorial team for the triennial. And tracking down the featured artists is all part of the fun. Research for the exhibition will be aided by an international network of correspondents and "informers," while the curatorial process will be presented in an accompanying catalogue that Gioni described as a "Facebook of a whole new generation."

Last week we told you about GQ design director Fred Woodward's first photo exhibition. Another fellow whose prowess as a photographer has been overshadowed by other impressive achievements? Jack Kilby (pictured at left, around 1960), the late Nobel prize-winning inventor of the integrated circuit, among other things. On Saturday, an exhibition of 58 of Kilby's photographs opened at Southern Methodist University (SMU)'s Meadows Museum in Dallas.

"Kilby printed his own negatives and showed real ingenuity in framing, printing, and cropping his photographs," writes Anne Peterson, the show's curator, in the exhibition notes. "The subjects he chose fall into several categories: cityscape, industrial, landscape, people, as well as abstractions and experimentation with processes." One shot of a woman pushing an infant in a stroller down an otherwise deserted stretch of cobblestones in Germany has the ethereal, shadowy gleam of a decisive moment captured by Henri Cartier-Bresson, while we can't help but scan the landscape of Kilby's 1970 photo of an abandoned farmhouse for a writhing Wyethian woman.

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You may know him as the design director of GQ or the art director who made Rolling Stone visually rock, but did you know that AIGA medalist Fred Woodward is also a photographer? His first exhibition of photos is in its final week at one of our favorite photo galleries, Mark Seliger's 401 Projects in New York City, and tonight at 6 p.m., Woodward will be there to speak about the images he captured 22 years ago. The show, "Going Over Home" (a lyrical morsel plucked from the spiritual "Wayfaring Stranger") features a series of photos that Woodward took to accompany Nicholas Lemann's 1986 Atlantic Monthly article "The Origins of the Underclass," which took him from housing projects on the South Side of Chicago to the small town of Canton, Mississippi (Woodward's home state).

Revisiting the project was actually a last-minute change of plans. "Driving home one night, I was listening to a discussion on the radio about Barack Obama and religion when I heard it said that maybe part of the problem was simply that many people in this country had never been inside an African-American church," writes Woodward in the show notes of what prompted him to look back at his contact sheets of Sunday services enlivened by full choirs, electric guitars, and people dancing in the aisles. "They were just mothers and fathers, relatives, and friends—people willing to risk everything for the promise of something a little better in this life for the ones they loved. I felt lucky to know them. It was only six days in my life, but it changed me forever."

As if you needed another reason to visit Parsons The New School for Design's life-affirming Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, tonight the new Lyn Rice Architects-designed building is the backdrop for a fizzy opening reception for the I.D. 2008 Annual Design Review, an exhibition of approximately 130 examples of outstanding design in eight categories—consumer products, graphics, packaging, environments, furniture, equipment, concepts, and interactive—selected by I.D.-appointed expert jurors in each field. (And yes, we realize that we said "design" five times in that last sentence.)

Among the honorees on display is the serene Mute Chair (pictured above) designed by Maaike Evers and Mike Simonian, better known as Mike and Maaike, whose design for Council earned a honorable mention in the furniture category. And don't miss our old friend the NYC Condom Dispenser (above, at far right), one of several Fuseprojects to earn an honorable mention in the equipment category. Also honorable in that category was Springtime's Bikedispenser (pictured after the jump), an automated bicycle rental station that has been called "like PEZ but good for you," by which we hope they're not implying that PEZ are somehow nutritionally lacking. The exhibition is on view at Parsons starting tomorrow and through September 28, but if you can't make it, check out the July/August issue of I.D. for the full scoop. Click "continued" for a list of the eight best-in-category winners and a few more photos.

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A few years ago, some jottings of the architect John Lautner (1911-94) were discovered, tucked away in a cupboard in his California vacation home since the late 1960s. One thought in the bunch nicely sums up Lautner's ambition and sheds light on much of his output (including the Jetsonian "Chemosphere," created in 1960 and pictured above): "The space age is progressing because it is right from scratch with no precedents," wrote Lautner. "The idea 'Go to the moon'...We should do this with Architecture." And so, starting this Sunday and through October 12, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles offers up "Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner," the first major exhibition survey of his work.

Curated by historian Nicholas Olsberg and architect Frank Escher (who, with partner Ravi GuneWardena, the Los Angeles Times on Sunday called "Lautner's architectural heirs"), the show will feature newly crafted large-scale models, digital animations that reveal Lautner's construction processes, and short films by documentary filmmaker Murray Grigor that convey the sensation of moving through the buildings and their sites. Also on view will be oodles of archival materials, including never-before-seen drawings (the best kind!), architectural renderings, study models, and construction photographs. Olsberg puts it best, "Lautner's dwellings took on dramatically new and varied shapes, as he moved toward the central theme of his career—how to use architecture to sublimate the domestic, and to domesticate the sublime." We like to think of him as the first architect to walk on the moon.

Here at UnBeige, we have an insatiable appetite for fantastic creatures of the deep (don't even get us started on the giant squid), so imagine our delight when today in downtown Manhattan we caught a glimpse of the Loch Ness Monster. Expect the reported "Nessie" sightings to explode come Wednesday, when apexart opens "Nessie Does New York: Monetizing Myth, Legend, and Culture," a new exhibition that turns the arts space into the Loch Ness giftshop, stocked with items ranging from stuffed Loch Ness monsters to mugs and key chains. On view through August 2, the show explores the commercialization of art, myth, and culture with the help of installation artwork by Adam Maron and Quincy Pearson. Meanwhile, apexart promises that Nessie will be joined in the exhibition by other creatures (some call them mythological, we prefer "controversial") such as the Chupacabra and Bigfoot. Look sharp for Mulder and Scully, as this has all the makings of an X-Files reunion.

To Banksy, he's "a force of nature" and "a phenomenon. And I don't mean that in a good way." Shephard Fairey describes him "an enigma," albeit an "infuriating" one. His passport reads Thierry Guetta, but he prefers "Mr. Brainwash," MBW for short. Whatever you call him, tonight he unleashes his graffiti-style, pop culture-saturated creations on Los Angeles in his first exhibition, an affair that he is staging himself in a former CBS studio complex on Sunset Boulevard. He has long been ready for his close-up.

Entitled "Life is Beautiful," the sprawling show promises paintings, sculptures, and prints (200 will be handed out free to first comers), as well as an installation made from 100,000 shoes and an outsized recreation of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" (who frankly, we always suspected of having kicked off their shoes beneath that starkly appointed bar). Writer Shelley Leopold, who brilliantly describes the makeshift gallery space as "the faded mocha edifice that until last year housed CBS's Columbia Square studios," recently got up close and personal with MBW for an LA Weekly cover story that touches on how he went from making a documentary about street artists such as Banksy and Fairey to wielding the wheat paste for himself. "The film, meanwhile, remains unfinished," notes Leopold, while "Banksy...is threatening to do a movie about the documentary Guetta never made."

As for the "Nighthawks" homage, it remained a work in progress when Leopold visited and may tonight take the form of a pop art-infiltrated tabluau vivant. "I was going to put skeletons in there dressed as the original characters, but that's too negative," Guetta said. "I'm a positive guy! Life is beautiful. So my idea is changing again. Maybe I'll get actors to dress up as Warhol and stand in there, or maybe I'll break the window and make it an abandoned building—like modern times!"

People tend to get giddy around the fantastical glass works of Dale Chihuly (perhaps this is why casinos can't seem to get enough of him), so expect Bay Area denizens to be unusually upbeat this summer. Saturday marked the opening of San Francisco's first major exhibition of the artist's work, and it's a big one. On view at the de Young Museum through September 28, the show encompasses 11 galleries of new and archival works spanning the last four decades. The artist calls it "the most ambitious show I've created to date." Besides chandeliers with such evocative titles as "Orange Hornet and Eelgrass," the show features a recreation of Chihuly's 1972 white milk-glass and neon installation as well as a 56-foot-long mille fiori garden of glass forms that only look like they're growing.

Building buzz for the exhibition have been Chihuly's three site-specific installations that debuted in April at both the de Young and the Legion of Honor Museum. The de Young has a 30-foot neon "Saffron Tower," which rises up like an glowing amber French fry from the museum's Pool of Enchantment (just what we need for UnBeige HQ, which is lacking in both swimming facilities and enchantment). At the Legion of Honor, a three-tiered chandelier and a pinched tower of blue and green tendrils are installed in the Rodin sculpture galleries while outside, Rodin's best known work ("The Thinker") ponders Chihuly's 14-foot yellow orb entitled simply, "Sun" (pictured above). Click "continued..." to see photos of the other installations.

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Here in Chicago, we often like to have a chip on our shoulder, that people don't think we're as important or as cultured as New York or Los Angeles. So we shrug a bit and ask "Why doesn't anyone treat NeoCon as a big of a deal as all your Basels or your miscellaneous Biennials?" But that's just the defeatist attitude that should not be accepted around here. What's more, it's just not true, because there are lots of people offering up coverage, including some by Core77, and, so far our favorite of the bunch, 3rings, who has a whole batch of "Live at NeoCon" posts, filled to the electronic brim with all the new chairs and sofas and weird uni-color mannequins from the Harrington College of Design. If you're not in the Chicagoland area, where NeoCon is running down at the Merchandise Mart until, well, the end of today, we highly recommend a visit to 3rings for a quickie virtual tour. If you are in Chicago for the big event, we recommend hitting up Metropolis for all of their annual advice on where to eat and drink while you're in our wonderful, wonderful city.