Histories are at the heart of some of our favorite shows, from queer video art to the cultural and familial traditions invoked by Candida Alvarez and Thomas Holton.

Scientists today still make use of Mary Banning’s research, examining the same mushrooms that she located, preserved, and packed away for posterity.

Her intimate photographs of women include humor and playfulness, and speak to her closeness to her subjects.

Dig into new and upcoming tomes on the long lineage of LGBTQ+ art, from Beauford Delaney’s bond with James Baldwin to iconic lesbian photographer JEB and Alice Austen.

Repurposed objects by Kiah Celeste and Yuji Agematsu and re-imagined architecture by feminist architect Phyllis Birkby are among our favorite artworks this week.

Phyllis Birkby harnessed her knowledge and lesbian feminist politics to encourage countless people to reimagine their built environments.

This commercial undertaking works hard to present itself with an institutional veneer, making claims that it “fosters a sense of shared responsibility” in the art world.

The exhibitions below, featuring such artists as Deborah-Joyce Holman and Luis Fernando Benedit, ask viewers to spend time with art that’s slower to reveal itself.

Exposure at Ulterior Gallery might not offer the quick answers our ever-shrinking attention spans demand, but much in this show is worth a second view.

A mini-retrospective of the feminist collective raises the question: What can be learned from this work that applies to today, and is this an effective method of making change?

In Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! performance artist Alina Troyano asks: Where does one identity start and the other end? Can they even be separated?

Join or Die is part of a cresting wave of cultural production circling around the intertwined issues of loneliness, divisiveness, and our political right turn.

Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution drives home who is worth paying attention to if you want comedy to lighten your load, and your fellow humans'.

Thomas’s shimmering collages are, among other things, meditations on and appreciations of Black female beauty and sexuality.

Two shows cast a critical eye on our fantasy of nature as it crashes up against the realities of the world we humans have created.

A new volume of Hilary Harkness’s paintings enfolds us into surreal worlds of gender-bending militaries, feminine revenge, and alternative histories.

Half a century after the Warhol film star’s death, writer and critic Cynthia Carr brings Darling’s life to light in an empathetic, well-researched new book.

Any New Yorker who steps into Loft Law: Photographs by Joshua Charow will likely look with a lascivious gaze upon the few remaining protected artist lofts.

In Nothing Ever Just Disappears, Hester wanders in search of kinship with queer bohemians such as James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, and Kevin Killian.

In quiet yet scrupulous detail, Designing Experience asks how the US National Park Service shapes the narratives it tells about this country and the lands it claims.

Several arts organizations have stopped requiring reference letters. More should follow suit.

What most stands out for me about 52 Artists at the Aldrich Contemporary is the sense of both engaging with and resisting categories.

What struck me most about LJ Robert's Carry You With Me is the way in which it depicts some of the complexity of queer New York.

First published in 1979, Eye to Eye is a work of social practice art that existed decades before the term entered the lexicon.

Saddled with student loan debt? Now might be a good time to pick up the Debt Collective’s Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay, which makes a compelling case for “economic disobedience.”

Attempting to complicate dominant narratives, "The Stonewall Reader" offers a broader, but not always balanced, range of accounts.

A recently published volume of Vernon Lee's writing reveals a woman who is a product of privilege, as well as someone who used what it afforded her to resist the status quo.

By asking what is and is not allowed, for whom, and who is writing the rules Curriculum at EFA Project Space offers tangible opportunities to challenge viewers' thinking.

By championing work in two perennially overlooked forms, artists books and performance art, often by artists who themselves are overlooked, Franklin Furnace’s archive is a repository of what doesn’t easily fit.

An exhibition at El Museo del Barrio brings us to the thorny side of profound themes like martyrdom and labor.

In Donna Gottschalk's photographs we’re not seeing LGBTQ history filtered or retold; we’re seeing it in the moment, from women who were there as it was unfolding.

A gloriously tactile exhibit at the Center for Book Arts offers a refreshing sense of playfulness in this age of anxiety.

What’s incredibly refreshing and exciting about Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon is that it’s a queer art show that specifically seeks a space beyond a taxonomic obsession.

An event at JACK presented five performances dealing with what it means to make art in an age of crisis.

A public sculpture series curated by the Studio Museum in Harlem showcases work by artists who have strong connections to the area.

A public artwork reminds us that what’s happening to the humans in a city is not necessarily the same as what’s happening to the animals.

The Visible Hand looks at how artists themselves build institutions, are managers, and are very much a part of and influenced by the systems their work moves through.

An exhibition attempts to find the new feminism in work by artists from around the world. It falls short of its task but raises some questions worth asking.

In a musical and dance performance, a multilingual cast explores the polyphony of Brooklyn through language and movement.

Curated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, the dance piece the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds incorporated structured improvisation, a deep sense of play, a bold engagement with the audience, and a particular permission given to watch and witness.

ARLINGTON, Va. — The landscape paintings that taught me most about the form as a young person were the works of Albert Bierstadt and Bob Ross.

It starts with the title: Outdoor Art. Simple, straightforward, you might think.

The road that led to last week’s Brooklyn Community Forum on Anti-Gentrification and Displacement at the Brooklyn Museum was long and winding, but its starting point is very clear.

A few years ago I was covering a panel discussion for Hyperallergic featuring members of Gran Fury, an ACT UP affinity group focused primarily on producing what group members themselves called “propaganda” against a government hellbent on isolating, vilifying, and smugly looking on as tens of thousands of their citizens died of AIDS.

When I walked into the Greene Space for Creative Capital’s first Creative Conversations event — focused on artists who make work about criminal justice and the prison system — I felt a little skeptical.

Within certain chambers of poetry in the past year, a series of incidents, specifically involving white poets presenting work that has been called out for its callous racism, has led to a great deal of debate on the internet and elsewhere.

Bounded and unbounded space, continental drift, turbulence, topology, pools of ink and color spilling into and pressing up against one another — these are some of the images in the mix of work on display in Endless, Entire, one of two shows currently on view at FiveMyles in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

When I arrived early on opening night of this year’s MIX NYC festival at a former manufacturing space in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, I heard a rumor that there used to be a panty factory there.

Early in koosil-ja’s new show I Am Capitalism, which ran at The Kitchen last week, she spoke through recorded voice-overs of a desire to acquire dances.