Following its premiere outside his native China at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art last year, multimedia artist Xu Bing’s vast sculpture Phoenix (2008-2010), consisting of male and female bird figures built with cast-offs gleaned from urban construction sites in China, is coming to New York, where the birds will take flight from the nave of a towering Gothic Revival church on the city’s Upper West Side. Weighing 12 tonnes each, the two birds represent the dignity of migrant workers, the artefacts of their daily lives, and the growing divide between the material and the spiritual in his country.

Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York, 1 March 2014 – January 2015

John Zinsser’s engagement with the formal and aesthetic dimensions of American abstraction has become, over the years, a commitment to its enduring relevance and potential to expand the boundaries of painting practice. Zinsser has written about and championed other artists exploring similar territory while making and exhibiting his own characteristically elegant, expertly crafted works. For Paintings and File Studies, he has selected a group of large oils on canvas and the drawings and collages that served as source material. - Cindi Di Marzo.

James Graham & Sons, New York, 14 February – 29 March 2014

“Artists should live experimentally,” says 2012 Turner Prize nominee Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, formerly known as “Spartacus”, after the Roman soldier who led a slave rebellion against the Roman republic. Chetwynd’s multimedia explorations involve wild rides through art history (Giotto) and literature (Dante’s Inferno), as well as playful deconstructions of identity by changing her own name. This self-titled first solo exhibition of her work at a public gallery in Britain, led by a guide dressed as the Addams Family’s cousin Itt, includes a selection of paintings from her Bat Opera series.

Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK, 25 January – 23 March 2014

Bohemia may be a state of mind, but it found its most attractive enactment in fin de siècle Paris, inspired by Henry Murger’s 1851 classic Scènes de la Vie de Bohème. Ironically, the poor-but-carefree lifestyle depicted in Murger’s novel attracted young artists, writers and thinkers from wealthy families, who rejected convention, prioritising art over money and comfort. Esprit Montmartre: Bohemian Life in Paris Around 1900 celebrates the community that emerged on Montmartre hill, with some 150 paintings by Picasso, Bonnard, Degas, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and others who lived there at its most exciting period of ferment.

Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 7 February – 1 June 2014

Anishinaabe expressionist artist George Morrison (1919-2000) was born on the Grand Portage Indian Reservation in Minnesota, but his quest as an artist took him far, both literally – he  studied in France, Italy and Spain and at the Art Students League of New York, painted on Cape Code and taught at the Rhode Island School of Design – and figuratively – he became friends with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and other prominent action painters and abstract expressionists. While his aesthetic drew on their modernist vision, he embraced nature as his religion, inspired by the rocks, trees, woods and wide horizon surrounding his birthplace as well as his people’s legends. Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison, a touring retrospective of his exquisite paintings, elemental totemic sculpture, and drawings and prints, highlights the romantic, spiritual dimensions of his art.

National Museum of the American Indian, New York City, 24 October 2013 – 23 February 2014 and travelling to six museums during 2015. 

Māori photographer John Miller won the 2003 Media Peace Prize Lifetime Award for his promotion of peace through his work. He describes himself as a “sympathetic observer”, but the power of his images indicates a reflective yet acute study of civil rights issues, particularly apartheid, as well as anti-nuclear and Māori demonstrations. John Miller: Tour Scrums brings together his black-and-white photographs of anti-apartheid protests in 1970s Wellington and the 2007 Tour Scrums: Protesting Black and Blue project, twin-screen colour work documenting the 1981 Springbok rugby tour conflicts in New Zealand.

Deane Gallery, City Gallery of Wellington, New Zealand, 1 February – 13 April 2014

The Musée d’art contemporain (MACM) marks 50 years as one of Montreal’s major cultural institutions by joining forces with the city’s other great repository of art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) for this exhibition, offered to the public free of charge. When Collections Collide: The Musée d’art contemporain at The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts concentrates on contemporary works, arranged as an “aesthetic conversation” between collections. The show spotlights individual strengths – installations, multimedia and photography by Canadians for MACM, painting and sculpture from at home and abroad for MMFA – while reinforcing the need for partnership and community. 

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada, 22 February – 15 June 2014 

While economic hardship and escalating political tensions in the 1930s made life difficult for people around the globe, the 1929 Wall Street crash and Hitler’s rise to power did not dampen the fashion industry. Edwardian stiffness and conventionality were cast aside in favour of a modern, streamlined aesthetic. Elegance in an Age of Crisis highlights breakthroughs in style, materials and manufacturing through an array of beautiful examples of haute couture, men’s tailoring, Hollywood costumes and sportswear created in the major fashion centres of the world for an international clientele.

The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York City, 7 February – 19 April 2014 

Among the most interesting experiments into how images are replicated, rearranged and transmitted through time and space, thus fracturing and conflating visual experiences, Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back, curated by French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman and first shown at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2010, riffs on work done by German cultural theorist Aby Warburg a century ago for his Mnemosyne Atlas. Afteratlas, a new iteration of the project presented by the Beirut Art Centre, is an Atlas-based photographic essay by Austrian photographer Arno Gisinger in collaboration with Didi-Huberman that keeps the images coming.

Beirut Art Centre, Beirut, Lebanon, 23 January – 22 March 2014 

Born in Portland, Oregon, and raised in San Francisco’s Chinatown, painter Martin Wong made New York City’s Lower East Side his adopted home. From 1978 until his death in 1999, Wong also collected art and antiques, notably the world’s largest assembly of graffiti art. Donated by him to the Museum of the City of New York in 1994, his archive consists of hundreds of works on paper and canvas and photographs documenting this vibrant ephemeral art form made by outsiders learning their craft on the streets. City as Canvas exhibits many of these works, some by Keith Haring, Lady Pink and Lee Quiñones, for the first time.

Museum of the City of New York, 4 February – 24 August 2014 

Canadian experimental film-maker and former jazz musician Michael Snow (Wavelength, Corpus Callosum) has just turned 84, but his multidisciplinary explorations into the nature of perception remain energised and engaging, his inquiries into the limits of representation precise and discerning. In addition to film and music, Snow has been a prolific painter, sculptor and writer. Michael Snow: Photo-Centric presents photographs taken between 1962 and 2003, in which the artist breaches the border between 2D and 3D and uses framing techniques to transform the medium into art.

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, 1 February – 27 April 2014 

Falling, fallibility and shame are recurring themes in Andrea Büttner’s work, which explores the positive aspects of passivity and the role of receptivity in creating value and meaning. While appropriation is a primary method for her, for example using drawings made by her father or filming Carmelite nuns making crafts, Büttner’s range of media includes woodcuts, fabric painting, and glass paintings, the latter featured in the catalogue for this self-titled solo exhibition.

The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, 24 January – 19 March 2014