GOINGS ON

What we're watching, listening to, and doing this week.

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The American painter John Singer Sargent became famous for making women look beautiful, so it made sense that for years he actively pursued the most famously beautiful woman in Paris, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau—then Paris's leading Belle Époque It Girl—to sit for him. When Sargent’s “Madame X” débuted at the Salon, in 1884, the public hated it. The winds of time have shifted its reputation from disgrace to masterpiece—and it is now the focus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Sargent & Paris” (through Aug. 3), which explores Sargent’s decade in the French city. (“The Birthday Party,” from 1885, is pictured.) The show is a perfect summer escape, full of popsicle-saturated colors in cool dark rooms, all leading up to the blockbuster event.—Rachel Syme

ABOUT TOWN

DANCE Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the founder of Urban Bush Women, recently handed over leadership of that pathbreaking company to younger hands so that she might focus on independent choreography. Now she is starting a term as artist in residence for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, and Ailey's summer season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music features the first première of that tenure.

Made in collaboration with the company members Samantha Figgins and Chalvar Monteiro, "The Holy Blues" looks at the crossover between sacred and secular, the juke joint and the church. It shares a program with two of the hardest works to match: Ronald K. Brown's transcendent "Grace" and Ailey's "Revelations."-Brian Seibert (BAM; June 5-8.)