On August 20, The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum opens Belief + Doubt, an installation by much-imitated and internationally renowned artist Barbara Kruger.

It’s the 4th of July, so we’re looking back at 236 years of American history in iconic images and artworks.

The New Museum’s Ostalgia, on view until September 25th, takes up almost all of the museum’s exhibition space, including the lobby. And the elevators. It’s literally floors upon floors of art that ranges from paintings to video installations to a car mounted on a wall. According to curator Massimiliano Gioni, the exhibition falls in line with the New Museum’s mission statement, which is to showcase art that New York doesn’t usually see. It might be hard to think of things that New York doesn’t see, but a massive exhibition of Soviet and post-Soviet art by over 50 artists across 20 countries is probably one of them. It’s gigantic and disorienting, which is exactly what Gioni was going for.

In the ghostly coal-mining towns of Eastern Ukraine, time stands still. Men die late in their fifties; women don’t live much longer. Ukrainian-born, Brooklyn-based photographer Sasha Maslov turns his lens on these human tragedies with Forgotten Village (2011), an exhibition that runs through September 3 at the Sputnik Gallery. In his photographs, Maslov captures the Ukraine’s coal miners who, trapped in this grave cycle since the fall of the Soviet Union, can’t escape their dead-end lives.