Matali Crasset, "MIXtree Salon d’interface musicale" (2005). Patrick Gries, Courtesy Centre Pompidou, Paris

Paris - Elles@pompidou, a massive re-hanging of the Centre Pompidou’s permanent collection of painting, sculpture, installations, photography, architecture, video and film by 200 women artists, has taken over the entire fourth floor and nine rooms of the fifth in what the museum’s president, Alain Seban, calls a "world premiere."

The 500 works, which are on view through May 2010, date from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Highlights include such new acquisitions as the English sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s 2003 Untitled (Room 101), a plaster cast commemorating the BBC office that inspired the torture chamber depicted in George Orwell’s 1984; Dorothea Tanning’s nightmarish installation Chambre 202, Hôtel du Pavot, 1970; and a 1939 portrait of Virginia Woolf by the 20th-century, German-born French photographer Gisèle Freund.

Architecture by Zaha Hadid - a model of her 2007 proposed design for the Philharmonie de Paris - and design by Matali Crasset are also displayed.

Loire Valley - France’s Loire region is known for a few very good things: prized wines such as Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé, sumptuous châteaux and the source of the country’s longest river, from which the area garners its name. From 5 June through 16 August, that mighty waterway serves as the backdrop for an extraordinary exhibition of installations. "Estuaire" is the second phase of a three-part biennial that began in 2007 and is backed by local governments as well as corporate sponsors. The 28 artworks on view this year will be concentrated in Saint-Nazaire and Nantes, with some pieces spread out along the 40-mile stretch of riverfront between the two cities. Participating artists include the Brazilian fabric shaper Ernesto Neto, who is contributing his outsized Leviathan Thot, 2006, previously shown in Paris at the Panthéon; and the provocative Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout, who is displaying his conceptual building Absence. Art lovers are encouraged to go with the flow aboard the fair’s 200-passenger boat that will ply the river, offering glimpses of many of the featured pieces.

The Punta della Dogana. © Graziano Arici, Courtesy Palazzo Grassi

Venice - The Biennale isn’t the only major art event transfixing Venice this month. Coinciding with that international spectacle is "Mapping the Studio," which opens 6 June and showcases selections from the François Pinault collection. For the exhibition, co-curators Alison Gingeras and Francesco Bonami chose 300 works by 50 talents, many of whom - including Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons and Cady Noland - the French tycoon has acquired in depth. The show reveals how "direct encounters with the artists in their own environments is crucial to the way Pinault thinks about art," Gingeras says. Pieces are installed at the Palazzo Grassi as well as in the Tadao Ando-restored 17th-century customs house, Punta della Dogana, which opens this month after a $26 million restoration. Charles Ray’s commissioned sculpture of a boy holding a frog, installed at the triangular point of this gleaming marble edifice, beckons viewers to the site.

Rome - Cindy Sherman masquerades for the camera once again in her latest body of work, 14 untitled portraits from 2008 that debuted last November at Metro Pictures, in New York, and that take over Gagosian Gallery’s Italian outpost from 7 June through 19 September.

The women she conjures up here bear little physical or aesthetic resemblance to one another: In one picture a white-gloved, fur-cloaked Sherman with a brunette bob has the hunched posture and weary eyes of a 70-something. In another, the artist is a blonde appearing to be no older than 50, in a lavender taffeta number better suited for a teen prom. But while the personas portrayed are chameleonlike, the depiction of excess - too much makeup (or worse, plastic surgery) and overornate finery - is a constant throughout the series, as are the themes of ungraceful aging and the trappings of wealth and femininity.

Prints, which are available in editions of six, range in price from $200,000 to $225,000.

Madrid - The 12th edition of PHotoEspaña (PHE), taking place from 3 June through 26 July in Madrid (Cuenca and Lisbon, Portugal, are also hosting related events), puts the spotlight on the prosaic.

Among the images displayed in the 31 exhibitions making up PHE’s Official Section are Dorothea Lange’s stark portraits of Japanese-Americans in internment camps during World War II, homeless men on Skid Row and migrant workers in California, at the Museo Colecciones ICO; Zhao Liang’s film series "City Scenes," showing the people of Beijing at play, at the Círculo des Bellas Artes; and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s grainy night-vision "still" videos of flowers, at the Matadero Madrid. On view for the first time in Spain are "Evidence," Californian duo Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s forensic-photograph reproductions, at the Royal Botanical Gardens, and Gerhard Richter’s painted photographs from 1989 to the present, at the Telefónica Foundation. But the festival’s theme is perhaps best encapsulated in "The ’70s: Photography and Everyday Life," held in the Plaza de Colón and featuring 20 artists, such as Christian Boltanski and David Goldblatt.

There is a commercial component to PHE as well: the Off Festival, which has 35 local participating dealers, including Egam and Astarté.

Patrimonio Nacional, Real Armeria, Madrid

Washington DC - Alvaro Soler del Campo, the director of the Spanish Royal Armory, raided 16 prestigious repositories of Iberian pomp, including the former royal residence El Escorial, to portray the glory of the empire through the war regalia of its kings. On view exclusively at the National Gallery of Art in the US capital from 28 June through 1 November, "The Art of Power" brings together more than 50 pieces of Renaissance armour and 20 portraits of metal-clad aristos by the likes of Diego Velázquez. Of the kings whose protective paraphernalia is on view, Charles V (1500-1558) was perhaps the most fastidious: He insisted on the best silversmiths from Germany and Italy. On view is his parade helmet, which Milanese craftsman Filippo Negroli personalised with gilded curls in a nod to the ruler’s fair locks.