Peter Alexander’s recent paintings on black velvet are virtuosic in the extreme. Lush, subaqueous fields stuck with tinsel, rhinestones, taffeta, and corduroy, they are almost painfully beautiful.

Alexander began making paintings on black velvet about six years ago (take that, Julian Schnabel), but those hard-edge glittering sunsets walked a thin line between the metaphysical idealism of his earlier cast-resin wedges and the vernacular trashiness of their own materials and subject matter. The high-tech transcendentalism of the wedges, their yearning sense of unattainable perfection, was clearly

Jerri Allyn is a California feminist who for several years has been working with the performance group the Waitresses, doing political pieces in galleries, at parties, in eating establishments, and on the street. Allyn is interested in service (coin of the realm for most women)—its beatitudes, its degradations, and its parallels with mothering and whoring. A year ago, she began to withdraw from live performance to work on costumes—especially aprons—for the Waitresses. This work recently expanded to “Apron: a covering worn in front to protect,” a series of posters produced as part of a feminist