Oklahoma City

Oklahoma occupies a unique place in American history. It is home to more Native American nations than any other state, but that didn't happen naturally. In the 1800s, the federal government drove 67 tribes from their ancestral homelands into the area then known as the Oklahoma and Indian territories—from the Ottawa in the North and the Delaware in the East to the Seminole in the South and the Modoc in the West. By Oklahoma statehood in 1907, 39 remained—and 39 remain today. Only four (the Caddo, Plains Apache, Tonkawa and Wichita) originally lived on this land; four others came seasonally or to hunt.

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Santa Barbara, Calif.

Eik Kahng, chief curator at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, wants to change your mind about Vincent van Gogh. Many people who love his brilliant paintings (and who doesn't?) also believe they know him. Through biographies, movies and monographic museum exhibitions, they see him as a lone genius, a stormy social misfit, a suicidal depressive, a failure in his lifetime. And they surmise that his angst was the wellspring of his groundbreaking art.

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St. Louis

'Paintings on Stone: Science and the Sacred 1530-1800," on display at the Saint Louis Art Museum, starts out strong, with "The Minions of Henry III" (c. 1570), a stunning image by an unknown artist in the Fontainebleau School, possibly Lucas de Heere. A close-cropped view of three effeminate men in profile, dressed in pearls, curls and sumptuous striped garments, it depicts the French king's male lovers, crisply portrayed in oil on slate. It's a seductive introduction to an exhibition whose thesis may seem esoteric to a public more attuned to image than materials.

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Federico da Montefeltro, an esteemed but ruthless mercenary captain, a bastard child who became Duke of Urbino, a renowned humanist who turned little Urbino into a dazzling European court, also commissioned one of the most fascinating paintings of the 15th century.

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As a "classical realist" who creates luminous landscapes, timeless still lifes and lifelike portraits, Jacob Collins operates outside the art world that usually receives media coverage. His work isn't on view in the supercool galleries of New York's Chelsea or at Art Basel Miami Beach. When his paintings are shown this April, it will be in Palm Beach, Fla., a haunt of the wealthy but an art backwater.

But that doesn't trouble Mr. Collins anymore. "I used to be mad at the art world and hate the art world, but it occurred to me that it would be like hating carnivals," he says. "The art world is a carnival; it's not my carnival. What is it to me if that pile of candy wrappers is called art?"

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