Ernie Gehr. CARNIVAL OF SHADOWS. 2012–15. Five-channel video (black-and-white and color, silent), approx 20 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Image courtesy the artist

Ernie Gehr is a key figure in postwar American avant-garde filmmaking, best known for such experimental film works as Serene Velocity (1970) and Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991) (both of which are in MoMA’s collection). Gehr’s films dazzle the senses, but they are not mere eye candy; they touch deeper themes of human perception and consciousness

Out of the ordinary offerings abound this week. Here are the highlights:

William S. Hart in Branding Broadway. 1918. USA. Directed by William S. Hart

William Surrey Hart was destined to be a cowboy. Known professionally as William S. Hart, he was born in 1864 in Newburgh, NY, into an environment of Victorian gentility.

Take advantage of after-hours offerings this week to ensure you don’t miss out on the very best of what’s on view in the galleries, in the theaters, and at MoMA PS1. Check it out:

In mid-January, two of MoMA’s six curatorial departments—Painting and Sculpture, and Drawings and Prints—held acquisitions meetings to usher into the Museum’s collection new artist’s books, posters, fabric installations, painted sculptures, and more. These meetings take place quarterly and, over the course of the year, result in the addition of hundreds of works—spanning mediums, geographies, and histories—to create an overall collection that is continuously evolving.

For Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015, MoMA commissioned Katharina Gaenssler to create a photo-mural right outside the exhibition galleries on the third-floor platform of the Museum’s Bauhaus Staircase, which is inspired by Walter Gropius’s famous staircase in the Bauhaus building in Dessau, Germany. Gaenssler photographed that stairway, as well as two works that reference it, both in MoMA’s collection: Bauhaus Stairway (1932) by Oskar Schlemmer and Bauhaus Stairway (1988) by Roy Lichtenstein. She collaged the resulting thousands of pictures together in an installation that explores the relationship between MoMA and the influential modernist school, tracing the history of the Bauhaus’s monumental contribution to the history of art and architecture through works of imitation and homage. In the process, she adds a new artwork to this lineage.

Before moving to New York in 1959, choreographer Simone Forti spent four heady, formative years in San Francisco. There, she trained with the postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin, who rejected the stylistic constraints of ballet and modern dance. On Halprin’s outdoor dance deck in wooded Marin County, Forti explored improvisation, her motions guided by a keen alertness to the body’s anatomy. She also organized open-work sessions with her then husband, the Minimalist artist Robert Morris, gathering artists for communal, multidisciplinary explorations of movement, objects, sound, and light.

If you have to dig yourself out from more than two feet of snow, you may as well have somewhere good to go. Here’s what we recommend this week:

How well do you know your MoMA? If you think you can identify the artist and title of these works from MoMA’s collection—all currently on view in the Museum—please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers next month (on Friday, February 19).

Artist Raúl de Nieves with his Day(Ves) of Wonder. 2007–14. Mixed media. © 2016 Raúl de Nieves. Installation view, Greater New York, MoMA PS1, October 11, 2015–March 7, 2016. Photo: Caleb Bryant Miller

I know sculptures can’t dance, but Raúl de Nieves’s Day(Ves) of Wonder looks like it might bust a move any minute. The three-foot piece—which depicts a humanoid figure in mid-groove, decked out in rainbow-colored platform boots, with swaying arms, cocked hips, and a sprawling, Medusa-like head—pulses with energy.