Good afternoon. It’s the first full day of the Trump administration, and it’s freezing — maybe hell finally froze over. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Let’s try to keep the faith; journalists and readers as we are, we know more than most that the truth is always a tangled knot of narratives, and any worldview that full-tilts toward either doom or victory is suspect. Accordingly, we’ve got a list of shows worth braving the outside world for — and also some online shows if that’s just not in the cards right now, which is alright, too. (You simply can’t be upset while taking in Beatrix Potter’s mice cozied up by the fire). These shows model the strategies we might use in a world that seems to be moving backward: Kamari Carter at Microscope Gallery, for instance, hooks up a live feed of Washington, DC’s police department, offering a perspective of the inauguration and capital less publicly seen. Tune into the world, it suggests, with your ear cocked to unusual frequencies. Lest us forget that one of the distinct pleasures of being the opposition is that ember of fiery inspiration burning within the pit of your stomach — lean into that feeling, and the world will open up precipitously for you. I felt that way when working on Natan Last’s review of Cameron Granger’s coolly furious work at the Queens Museum. Last — who makes our crossword — grooves to the secret momentum of Granger’s game grids, animating the connections between the ways both the puzzle and the urban grid direct, corral, and contain us. And Taliesin Thomas’s review-slash-walkthrough of Linda Mussman’s exhibition with the artist herself thawed my heart, reminded me of why we in the art world do what we do. There’s something, too, to John Yau’s expansive reading of the work of Sylvia Plimack Mangold. Her representational, trompe l’oeil works teach a form of acceptance: No use in trying to arrest time, only to shape our passage through it. “Never once,” he writes, “does she seek refuge or turn away.”
— Lisa Yin Zhang, Associate Editor
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