Delicate and poised, spidery and animated, these bronze casts of tree trunks, hollowed out and painted with a radiant gold-leaf interior, seem to prowl the gallery on their spindly branched limbs. This new site-specific work for the Bloomberg Commission, Spazio di Luce (Space of Light) (2012), was created by the youngest artist to have been admitted to the Arte Povera group, Giuseppe Penone (b1947), using the time-old technique of Lost Wax casting, deliberately reversing the interior and exterior of the trees.

The Whitechapel Gallery, London, until September 2013

Retro furniture, disembodied speakers, bits of drum kit, wires and LEDs, Untitled Song is a sculptural installation that traverses boundaries between sound and vision, sculpture and music, analogue and digital. A collaborative effort between James Clarkson and Haroon Mirza, there are few clues as to what to expect from this exhibition, but it certainly promises an intriguing experience.

MIMA, Middlesborough, until 6 June 2013.

While Los Angeles’ modern residential architecture is world renowned, the innovative nature of its infrastructure and urban planning, commercial and civic buildings, housing experiments, and other architectural forms is less well-known. Initiated by the Getty, Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in LA, comprising 11 exhibitions and a range of accompanying events in and around the city, celebrates precisely this. Taking a wide-ranging look at the region’s modern architectural heritage, as well as the significant contributions of LA architects to national and global developments, it examines a diverse group of practitioners, from internationally known figures such as Richard Neutra and Frank Gehry, to others who have helped shape Southern California’s distinctive profile, such as A. Quincy Jones and Eric Owen Moss. 

Seventeen cultural institutions in and around Los Angeles, April–July 2013.

The Art Institute of Chicago has inaugurated a newly commissioned installation, Rise Up Ye Mighty Race!, made by American artist Kara Walker, who is known for her use of simple black cut-paper silhouettes to explore provocative themes. With her shadowy figures, reminiscent of popular 19th-century cartoon characters, Walker tells stories that recall such atrocities as slavery or violence against woman. Also on view are five of Walker’s large graphite drawings and 40 smaller mix-media works.

Gallery 293, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, until 11 August 2013.

The Guatemalan photographer Luis González Palma, now a resident of Argentina, has a solo exhibition opening at the Art Museum of the Americas (AMA) in Washington, DC, at the end of the month. AMA’s mission is to show artists whose work involves and elicits social and political discourse. Un Lugar sin Reposo/A Place with no Rest consists of photographs in which the artist juxtaposes elements creating narratives that reference his cultural heritage. The repetition of themes and images in the portraits and scenarios conveys the idea of time passing.

Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC, 28 March–26 May 2013.

The sculpture Firmament III (2009) by Antony Gormley has been acquired for the permanent collection of the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp, Belgium. The title of the work is rooted in an ancient word denoting the sky, and Gormley fashioned the three-dimensional shape to be similar to a star cluster and to reflect the lights of the firmament. The stainless steel bars outline a sort of giant hollow man that is the centre of the constellation. To mark the occasion when the monumental artwork was unveiled to the public, the open-air museum also premiered Gormley's series of polyhedral sculptures at the museum’s new exhibition pavilion, Het Huis (The House).

Firmament and Other Forms, Middelheim Museum, Antwerp, until 5 May 2013. 

Work created in the last decade by Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian is the focus of a show at The Third Line, a contemporary Middle Eastern art gallery in Dubai. Nearly 90 years old, Farmanfarmaian still tirelessly produces her eclectic pieces by combining a myriad of materials and styles, from mirrored mosaics and coloured glass to geometric patterns and ancient Persian symbols. The artist, who lived as an exile in New York before returning to Teheran in 2004, has exhibited in many International shows, including three editions of the Venice Biennale, and has made commissioned works for the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This show also follows the development of a new series in which she investigates cosmological representations.

The Third Line, Dubai, until 19 April 2013.

Man Ray, whose work helped elevate the status of photography to fine art, is celebrated in a retrospective exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery covering more than 60 years of his career. While living between New York and Paris, Man Ray associated with some of the most important artists and writers in the Surrealist, Dada and Modernist movements: Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, James Joyce, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali, Le Corbusier and Virginia Woolf. Portraits of these leaders in the avant-garde and other famous contemporaries can been seen at the show together with Man Ray’s nudes and more experimental work in the medium.

National Portrait Gallery, London, until 27 May 2013.

To celebrate its 15th anniversary year, the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art is hosting a career-spanning exhibition of one of its most popular artists: Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964). Focusing on his works on paper, and including around 80 drawings, watercolours and etchings, the exhibition captures the spirit of an artist keen to experiment with a variety of mark-making processes, and with an uncanny ability to capture the essence of a scene and render it with minimal detail, abstracted even, often focusing more on the negative space between objects, and thus forcing viewers to use and combine their skills of perception and imagination.

Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London, until 7 April 2013.