‘THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION’ at the Museum of the Moving Image (ongoing). The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America’s great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program “Sam and Friends” before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft-faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother’s old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show,” though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace-and-love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago)

718-784-0077, movingimage.us

‘ILLUSTRATING BATMAN: EIGHTY YEARS OF COMICS AND POP CULTURE’ at the Society of Illustrators (through Oct. 12). Batman turned 80 in April, and now the character is being celebrated with this visual feast of covers and interior pages, teeming with vintage and modern original comic art that shows the hero’s evolution. The exhibition includes “Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan,” a display devoted to a Batman story originally printed in Japan, and “Batman Collected: Chip Kidd’s Batman Obsession,” featuring memorabilia belonging to the graphic designer Chip Kidd. (George Gene Gustines)

212-838-2560, societyillustrators.org

‘ALICJA KWADE: PARAPIVOT’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Oct. 27). This shrewd and scientifically inclined artist, born in Poland and based in Berlin, has delivered the best edition in five years of the Met’s hit-or-miss rooftop sculpture commission. Two tall armatures of interlocking steel rectangles, the taller of them rising more than 18 feet, support heavy orbs of different-colored marble; some of the balls perch precariously on the steel frames, while others, head-scratchingly, are squinched between them. Walk around these astral abstractions and the frames seem to become quotation marks for the transformed skyline of Midtown; the marbles might be planets, each just as precarious as the one from which they’ve been quarried. (Farago)

212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

‘SIMONE LEIGH: LOOPHOLE OF RETREAT’ at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through Oct. 27). Leigh’s sensuous, majestic sculptures of black female figures fuse the language of African village architecture and African-American folk art, and sometimes racial stereotypes, like the “mammy” figurines produced and collected in earlier eras in America. Sculpture is only one part of the practice that earned Leigh the Hugo Boss Prize 2018, but it is the one that inspired this show of three large objects in a gallery off the rotunda. The title comes from the writings of Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman who spent seven years hiding in a crawl space to escape her master’s advances. In the exhibition, the “loophole” becomes a kind of artistic conceit, too, in which Leigh moves deftly between mediums, styles and messages, addressing multiple audiences — but always, as she has stated, black women. For Leigh, loopholes might include representations of women that link back to ancestors or empower women by drawing on the freedom available through art. In that sense, these sculptures are sentinels, and placeholders. (Martha Schwendener)

212-423-3840, guggenheim.org

‘THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALVIN BALTROP’ at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (through Feb. 20). New York City is a gateway for new talent. It’s also an archive of art careers past. Some come to light only after artists have departed, as is the case with Baltrop, an American photographer who was unknown to the mainstream art world when he died in 2004 at 55, and who now has a bright monument of a retrospective at this Bronx museum. That he was black, gay and working class accounts in part for his invisibility, but so does the subject matter he chose: a string of derelict Hudson River shipping piers that, in the 1970s and ’80s, became a preserve for gay sex and communion. In assiduously recording both the architecture of the piers and the amorous action they housed, Baltrop created a monument to the city itself at the time when it was both falling apart and radiating liberationist energy. (Cotter)

718-681-6000, bronxmuseum.org