Beat the heat this summer by hanging out inside an art museum. Hopefully, one of these exhibits is in a city near you. There’s no better excuse than the heat of summer to seek a little culture and a little air conditioning at the same time.

Prom: Photographs by Mary Ellen Mark

Prom: Photographs by Mary Ellen Mark
Museum: Philadelphia Museum of Art
Dates: July 1 – October 28, 2012

Between 2006 and 2009, American photographer Mary Ellen Mark visited thirteen high school proms to create portraits of attendees with a 20-by-24-inch Polaroid Land Camera. Only five such cameras exist, and they make extraordinary and unique large-format prints.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #193, 1989; Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York; © 2012 Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman
Museum: San Francisco MoMA
Dates: July 14 – October 7, 2012

One of the most influential artists of our time, Cindy Sherman creates provocative photographs that explore wide-ranging issues of identity and representation. Working as her own model, she deftly transforms her appearance using wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props to create intriguing tableaux and characters inspired by movies, TV, magazines, and art history.

Ed Ruscha, California Grapeskins, 2010

Ed Ruscha: On The Road
Museum: Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami
Dates: May 24 – September 2, 2012

Ed Ruscha, whose career spans five decades, is known for his use of language to document and comment on the shifting character of American culture. Ruscha drew inspiration from the classic American novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac in his own limited art book version of the novel, and has created a new body of paintings, drawings, and photographs.

Superstudio Cube of Forest on the Golden Gate 1970-1971 Collage with photo gravure and alterations in crayon

Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974
Museum: MOCA, Los Angeles
Dates: May 27- September 3, 2012

The first large-scale, historical-thematic exhibition to deal broadly with Land art, capturing the simultaneous impulse emergent in the 1960s to use the earth as an artistic medium and to locate works in remote sites far from familiar art contexts.

Josef Albers, Color Study for White Line Square, oil on blotting paper with gouache, pencil and varnish, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, inv. no. 1976.2.22.

Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper
Museum: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York
Dates: July 20 – October 14, 2012

With approximately sixty oil sketches on paper, this exhibition will reveal a private side of Albers’s work. These sketches were never exhibited in the artist’s lifetime and have rarely been seen after his death.

George Bellows Both Members of This Club, 1909 Chester Dale Collection 1944.13.1

George Bellows
Museum: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Dates: June 10 – October 8, 2012

When George Bellows died at the age of forty-two in 1925, he was hailed as one of the greatest artists America had yet produced. Bellows is arguably the most important figure in the generation of artists who negotiated the transition from the Victorian to the modern era in American culture. This exhibition will provide the most complete account of his achievements to date and will introduce Bellows to new generations.

Edgar Olaineta, Solar Do-(It-Yourself) Nothing Toy. After Charles Eames, 2012, from the Factory Direct: Pittsburgh exhibition.

Factory Direct: Pittsburgh
Museum: The Warhol Museum (on view at Guardian Self-Storage)
Dates: June 24 – September 9, 2012

Factory Direct: Pittsburgh artists worked closely with the management teams and factory workers within their host facilities to plan and execute a new work of art based on the factory’s history, technologies, materials, and/or processes.

Seung-Woo Back / RW001-001, 2004 / One of five prints from Real World I / Digital prints, 50 * 66 1/2 inches / Courtesy of the artist

More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness
Museum: SITE Santa Fe
Dates: July 7, 2012 – January, 2013

Over the past century, during a period of unprecedented technological change and global social upheaval, once-established beliefs, or “truths,” have been cast into doubt, changing and shaping our understanding and experience of reality. Through diverse media and in unexpected ways, this exhibition explores the impact and role of deception, play, memory, power, simulation, and new technologies on art and everyday life.

Leonetto Cappiello, (Italian, 1875–1942, active in France), Chocolat Klaus, 1903. Color lithograph. The Rennert Collection, New York City. Image courtesy of Jack Rennert, New York.

Posters of Paris: Toulouse-Lautrec and His Contemporaries
Museum: Milwaukee Art Museum
Dates: June 1 – September 9, 2012

Advertising everything from tony theatre productions to the licentious cancan, bicycles to cookies, brightly hued posters featuring bold typography and playful imagery punctuated the streets of turn-of-the-century Paris.

Denver International Airport, Denver, Colorado, 1991-95. Photograph © Ellen Jaskol / Sketch © Curtis Fentress / Architectural drawing © Fentress Architects.

Now Boarding: Fentress Airports + the Architecture of Flight
Museum: Denver Art Museum
Dates: July 15 – October 7, 2012

An exhibition that will take visitors on a journey through the history of airports aided by film, digital art, animation, models, drawings, photographs, and full-scale architectural elements. Visitors will travel through six airports designed by Denver-based Fentress Architects.