Can an artist simultaneously celebrate and critique pop culture? Those familiar with the incredibly varied work of Richard Prince have seen appropriation, pop culture, and cultural criticism battle it out over the span of his 30-year career. His medium of expression varies greatly, from recreating photography, paintings, reprints of comics, and even collecting clay auto-body molds. The duality of his work is evident in his 1980s photographic recreations of the Marlboro advertising campaign, which celebrates the iconic image of the cowboy and Western landscape, while drawing attention to the hypocrisy that such an image would be used to advertise an addictive, unhealthy vice. His Nurses, inspired by the covers of pulp-fiction hospital romance novel covers, are both alluring and unsettling. Also, regardless of where his aesthetic inspiration takes him, each series of work explores concepts of artistic ownership, as he recreates and sometimes simply reprints photography, imitating iconic corporate symbols, or reprinting text or quotes from writers. Prince forces the viewer to reconsider context, drawing attention to the irony of pop culture, while bringing what is normally left unsaid to the forefront. After Hours Preview Party features food, film screenings of Rendezvous and The Honeymoon Killers, a text-based art activity, and music by Skoal Kodiak for $35 from 9 p.m. to midnight Friday, March 21. — Jessica Armbruster

It's hard to explain the suburbs to someone who has never lived in one. Like an exclusive fraternity, the 'burbs are full of cultural tics that influence our culture, political climate, and society in ways we might not even realize. The Walker's "Worlds Away" explores the split personality of the suburbs; how they can be simultaneously hailed as a utopian realization of family values and the American dream, and criticized for being an intestinal tract, shitting out conformity and homogeneity. In this group show featuring 30 artists and architects, works include colorful photography: a man mowing a dead lawn, a woman proudly standing in front of her McMansion in a silk robe, as well as architectural designs proposing the dawn of a new suburban aesthetic. The Walker After Hours Preview Party promises to be far more fun than a soccer-mom ice-cream social thanks to music by the appropriately named Alpha Consumer, and DJ Glen Leslie, and a screening of Jonathan Kaplan's Over the Edge (1979), a flick about a planned community and the teen hooligans who act out against it. Just don't try to make small talk about your sprinkler system or new SUV. The opening party is $35 from 9 p.m. to midnight on Friday, February 15. — Jessica Armbruster

The categorization of great coffee as a fine art has taken on a new meaning. After hitting Boston, New York, Las Vegas, and Washington, D.C., over the past few years, the traveling photographic exhibition "The Birth of Coffee" is visiting Minnesota until May 7. Journalist and photographer Daniel Lorenzetti's most recent project tries to expand the scope of coffee past consumers' mouths and into the larger, overtly political world in which it is grown. The 40 black-and-white silver prints on display are quite fittingly, and literally, toned in coffee, and depict the lives of coffee growers in Brazil, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Yemen. Lorenzetti and his wife, Linda Rice Lorenzetti, traveled five different continents doing research that resulted in a co-authored coffee-table book, The Birth of Coffee, and this exhibition, which explore the individuals and unique experiences that contributed to the $4 latte so many people mindlessly gulp each day. — Amy Lieberman

One doesn't need a use Twitter account, an emoticon on a LiveJournal entry, or a link to Google maps to understand that the ways we express and comprehend the meaning of "where" is changing with new technology. This is the general premise of Intermedia Arts ongoing show, "W(e are)Here," a multimedia exhibit that explores the new frontier of "place" physically, technologically, and emotionally. Works include artistic visualizations of hard data, interactive elements, and emotional renderings of location. This Thursday, from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m., guests can partake in a "Psychogeographic Mapmaking Party," which, while it sounds like a mouthful, is really more of an adventure. Participants will be sent off in small groups on tours where routes will be dictated by a rolling of dice. Using a wall canvas, Google Earth, a wall projector, and some booze, tour details and memories will then be layered onto one another to create a map of experiences. An art party featuring live music, food and drinks, and a presentation of the final map will be celebrated the next day from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. — Jessica Armbruster