A CRAMPED LIVING ROOM appears like a diorama of 1960s Greenwich Village bohemia, afloat in the engulfing expanse of the Harvey Theater’s stage. It contains all the warmth and ire and humanity that get bottled up in a typical New York apartment: a whole world unfolding with nowhere to go. The chasmic darkness of America waits just outside its cozily art-covered walls.

Incendiary optimism, depicted as a necessity in life and politics, suffuses Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), staged this past February and March by Anne Kauffman at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in

Feted by what she calls the “daylight culture”—winner of the Mercury Prize in 2005, Oscar nominee eleven years later—Anohni is doubling back to her days (nights, really) as a performance artist in early-’90s New York. Anohni’s quarantine project was culling from her “threadbare” archive, making thousands of stills from videos of her theater collective, the Blacklips Performance Cult, which rose from Manhattan’s queer underground between the summer of ’92 and spring of ’95. The results are presented in the book Blacklips: Her Life and Her Many, Many Deaths (Anthology Editions), coedited by Marti

IF I WERE GUARDING the gates of heaven, I’d let in all the cinematographers, no questions asked. They toil for such piddling rewards here on Earth. No matter how transcendent their efforts, they answer to a director who may or may not know anything about lenses or color grading but gets the bulk of the credit either way. On the rare occasion that a cinematographer receives some mainstream attention, it’s usually because there’s something showoff-y about the work: Emmanuel Lubezki’s look-ma-no-cuts trickery for Birdman, say, or Roger Deakins’s for 1917, which transplants roughly the same technique

To his own surprise, Matt Mullican’s new body of work is vibrantly colorful. A departure and liberation of sorts, it is also his most labor-intensive work yet. Made in his Berlin studio, “Sunday, August 9, 1908” consists of very large paintings involving rubbing, a technique he’s been using since the early ’80s. A first rubbing transfers the image to be painted; a second rubbing draws outlines around the painted areas with an oil stick. Below, the artist describes his painstaking process, how the project came about, and how it fits into his work as a whole. “Sunday, August 9, 1908” remains on

ONLY ONE PERSON dances in Valentin Noujaïm’s short film Pacific Club, 2023, named for Le Pacific Club Privé, a quondam nightclub once located in a parking garage several stories below an office building in La Défense, the steely, corporate fortress built just outside of Paris. Open tous les nuits to a predominantly Arab, North African, and immigrant clientele for the better part of the 1980s, the Pacific spun bops by Québécois R&B act Boule Noire, American soul singer Lillo Thomas, and Egyptian-born, Franco-Italian chanteuse and gay icon Dalida, among others; the club also introduced Raï music

IT SEEMS VAGUELY IMPLAUSIBLE that a band as important as Still House Plants started playing out in 2015 and is only just making their American debut this Thursday and Friday, presented by Blank Forms at FourOneOne in Brooklyn. That’s eight years that we haven’t been able to see them ribbon the fabric of time with guitar, drums, voice—and nothing else. They started in the mid-2010s at the Glasgow School of Art and slowly made their way to London, releasing singles and cassettes and one-offs that are now hard to find (or at least impossible to buy). After a long pause during the early pandemic,

A CRAMPED LIVING ROOM appears like a diorama of 1960s Greenwich Village bohemia, afloat in the engulfing expanse of the Harvey Theater’s stage. It contains all the warmth and ire and humanity that get bottled up in a typical New York apartment: a whole world unfolding with nowhere to go. The chasmic darkness of America waits just outside its cozily art-covered walls.

Incendiary optimism, depicted as a necessity in life and politics, suffuses Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), which runs until March 24 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it is being staged

Over the past year, Kalmyk American poet Sasha Stiles has become the public face of the burgeoning world of poetry NFTs, which circulate and monetize poems outside of poetry books and magazines. She cofounded theVERSEverse, a “poetry NFT gallery,” in 2021, has sold her own tokenized poems through platforms like Christie’s and SuperRare, and has spoken widely about the commercial and even aesthetic potential of NFTs for poetry. Inspired by the idea of “ars poetica” and by text-based visual art, the homepage of theVERSEverse boldly declares “poem = work of art.” The 2021 exhibition “Computational

HUSTLED INTO THEATERS, onto streaming services, or continuing their festival tours, the very fine, the undistinguished, and the (unnamed below) abysmal movies from the 2023 Sundance Film Festival are soon debuting in New York. Not to be missed is Babak Jalali’s coolly deadpan comedy, Fremont, in which a former translator from Afghanistan takes a job in a San Francisco fortune cookie factory and discovers, by chance, her path to a new life. It takes nothing away from Jalali’s distinctive filmmaking voice to say that the economy and sorrowful humor of Fremont is reminiscent of Aki Kaurismäki and

THE SELF-PORTRAIT ISN’T THERE. Otherwise, the heist is going fine. Willem Dafoe has breached the penthouse, thwarted the alarm, located two fairly chaste but still pricey Schieles. There’s just one thing, though. The self-portrait: Dafoe can’t find it. In its place is a sort of picture-book orgy featuring an eerie likeness of the apartment’s owner. Time is running out. The “smart home” glitches and all the doors slam shut. Our hero is trapped, imprisoned, surrounded by priceless art, choice design, and an eight-figure view of Manhattan.

This is the premise of Vasilis Katsoupis’s Inside: A burglary

Tommy Kha’s mother is a recurring subject in his photography, but he didn’t realize until five years into their collaboration that she was an imagemaker herself. In 2016, she gifted Kha a photo album of pictures she made when she first arrived in Canada from Vietnam in the 1980s, before she eventually settled in Memphis, where Kha was born. In his debut monograph, Half, Full, Quarter (Aperture), and accompanying solo exhibition—“Ghost Bites,” at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York through March 22—Kha’s layered portraits, still lifes, and landscapes exist alongside his mother’s own photographs.

“HERE COME THE DYKES! Here come the dykes!” A few seasoned attendees began the chant, as if to hasten the proceedings, celebrate our gathering in public space, and denote a protest action in one breath. They were swiftly joined by the rest of the intergenerational mix. This boisterous full house had gathered at New York City’s LGBT Community Center last month to see Joan E. Biren’s (“JEB”’s) sapphic slide lecture The Dyke Show, an alternative history of photography devoted to lesbian photographers and subjects, made in 1979, the heyday of feminist lesbian separatism. Officially hosted by the