“Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1999-2016”

A lot of artists transform ordinary objects into art works, but Sachs’s pieces evince a funky swagger mixed with crowd-pleasing populism. His best-known project, Space Program: Mars, filled the Park Avenue Armory in 2012 with a full-scale simulation of a mission to the Red Planet, complete with mission control, launch platforms, exploratory vehicles and a martian landscape. This show, which takes up the museum’s glass entryway, surveys a series of sculptures created over the last 17 years that are based on that icon of street culture, the boom box. Among the highlights: Toyan’s from 2002, a group of speakers measuring eight feet in height by twelve feet in length inspired by Jamaican sound systems.