Whether it’s the setting for a satirical sitcom family or a dress made from bright-blue plastic bags, there’s a growing trend of IKEA products used by artists as raw material for statements on globalization, the ideal form, and minimalism.

This summer the multi-gallery show Jew York highlights works by Jewish contemporary artists working in the Big Apple. Opening June 20, the show will include pieces by Roy Lichtenstein, Joel Shapiro, Leon Golub, Hannah Wilke, and others.

The Menil’s new show pairs objects from the Byzantine era with modern works by Flavin, Picasso, and Rothko, among others. Noting the “peculiar animism” of the Byzantine era, curator Glenn Peers says his aim was “to give these objects back some of their strangeness.”

A public art revolution is brewing in St. Paul, where the city has brought in privately funded “city artists” to work alongside public servants. Public Art Review chronicles how these artists explore creative forms of “placemaking” and civic engagement.

Armored police forcibly evicted protesters occupying Tadashi Kawamata and Christophe Scheidegger’s Art Favela at Art Basel Friday. About 100 people were protesting the “decadence of including a slum setting as part of one the world’s biggest art fairs.”

Latitudes reviews the ubiquitous totes of the Venice Biennale, from the Tucano-designed official bag (“its uncompromising blackness” has a “vital rather than dour spirit”) to the bag for Jesper Just’s Danish Pavilion (“Charismatic artist. Woeful tote”).