Richard Baker is best known for his still-life paintings of tabletops, often tilted at impossible angles and covered with out-of-print art books and other bric-a-brac, such as ceramic pots, to-go food containers, candy bars, and tulips. Ranging from the lowbrow Learn to Draw by Jon Gnagy (Mr. “Learn-To-Draw”) to the hefty catalogue of the exhibition Paris-New York (1977) — the year the artist graduated from high school — Baker’s non-hierarchical representations form an inventory of the books that have, at different times, been central to his ongoing education, stretching from when he was a teenager until the present.

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The New Orleans-based kinetic sculptor conjures up the mechanized hum of another world through her theatrical plug-in pieces at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in an exhibition that includes everything from roving robots to the clang and thump of motorized music. While these installations are certainly electric, they’re decidedly different than Emery’s wind and water-driven creations that might be more familiar to the city’s residents.

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