PREVIEW U.S. SHORTS.

INSTALLATIONS AND EXHIBITIONS of sound art, light, and space? Must mean summer--at least in the outer boroughs. P.S.x leads the way, casting the net wide to enlist composer and musician Elliott Sharp to cocurate (with director Alanna Heiss) "Volume," a show with sound installations by Ikue Mori, Francesco Lopez, and Christian Marclay, among others, plus "sonic drawings" by Max Neuhaus. Beyond the gallery walls of the former schoolhouse, the annual music series "Warm Up" will provide backup every Saturday. Creative Time's two-week-long music program "Audiolab" opens July 13, featuring the likes of Scanner and Moby each Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in the grandiose cavern of Brooklyn's Anchorage; leading up to the series will be a sound installation by Austrian artists Granular Synthesis (June 1-25). Ilya and Emilia Kabakov's multileveled "Palace of Projects" will appear in Manhattan's Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory from June 14 until July 13 under the auspices of the Public Art Fund, and a selection of David Sm ith's Cubi sculptures (in addition to Sentinel V, 1959) will stand tall against the bucolic Central Park backdrop on the Metropolitan Museum's roof garden beginning May 16.

Cathy de Monchaux will install new, site-specific work at the Hirshhorn, in Washington DC (July 14- Oct. 22), while Glenn Ligon will return to a Washingtonian theme, the Million Man March, albeit in St. Louis (his new series of twelve works goes up at the St. Louis Art Museum on May 9). At the same institution, several artists, including Joep van Lieshout, Ernesto Neto, Gregor Schneider, and Olafur Eliasson (who can also be seen solo at the Art Institute of Chicago, May 3-Aug. 12), are conspiring to transform the St. Louis site into an interconnected series of alternate realities in "Wonderland" (July 1-Sept. 24). Curator Rochelle Steiner will expound on the theoretical underpinnings of this utopian carnevale in a catalogue also featuring essays by Terence Riley, Giuliana Bruno, and Beatriz Colomina. A shade darker will be the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth's "Natural Deceits," organized by chief curator Michael Auping to draw out the "overlap between the real and the fictive" in the work of eleven artists including Nic Nicosia, Vernon Fisher, and Francesca Fuchs (May 14-Sept. 10). And in Miami, the Museum of Contemporary Art will show the photographs of Malian portraitist Seydou Keita (June 8-Sept. 10).

Up North, one-time Automatiste (Quebecois for Abstract Expressionist?) Marcelle Ferron will be lauded in a large retrospective at Montreal's Musee d'Art Contemporain, and video artist Bill Seaman draws inspiration from the limit text that allowed for Surrealist practices in the first place in an adaptation of Mallarme's "Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard" entitled Red Dice (July 15-Oct. 9, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa). If Bill Seaman extrapolates the precious meaning gathered in the cups of past greats, Christian Boltanski gathers it into a dark, auratic cloud of photo- graphically inspired re-engagements with the past; his large (possibly even humongous) installation is at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts (Aug. 9-Nov. 12). Tobias Rehberger will set a parade of potted plants to line the hallways of the MCA Chicago from July 1 to September 10; and a much-anticipated new video installation from Shirin Neshat will be on view at the Wexner Center, in Columbus, Ohio, from May 11 to August 13, alongside paintings by Thai artist Udomsak Krisanamis. Stephen Balkenhol is creating a new series of sculptural figures hacked out in wood for show at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, from June 17 to August 27, and on the western front, Patty Chang's first museum exhibition features performance-based work drawing on her impressions of Chinese contortionists, furthering her project of self-manipulation, in "Let Down and Release," at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (May 13-July 23).