In an interview, gender-queer author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore declared, “If I had to choose one piece of art that has been the most damaging to urban life over the last few decades, I would choose”—wait for it—“Patti Smith’s Just Kids because she facilitates this mythology of New York, that fame is a chain of coincidences that happened because of her great talent.” I was thrilled at Sycamore’s iconoclastic jab. It was part of a larger point she was trying to make about nostalgia as a form of violence.

Smith had her first art exhibition in 1973, the same year a sixty-foot chunk of the elevated

For painter Karen Carson, an early West Coast Minimalist, the abstract has been, and continues to be, a quiet and powerful tool for navigating the maelstrom of life in the here and now. This notion was made strikingly clear in “Middle Ground,” an exhibition that featured two bodies of work created nearly fifty years apart.

Carson’s more recent bas-relief paintings are small, intricate, and intimate, crafted from numerous hand-cut and individually painted pieces of wood. Taking inspiration from the environment of her Montana studio, Carson uses some of nature’s more vivid hues to create kaleidoscopic

In her solo exhibition at Bel Ami, “Watch the Bouncing Ball,” which spanned the holidays and stretched into the new year, Lauren Satlowski turned a studied eye onto the trinkets and textures of our time, rendering glossy surfaces and glowing gradients with scrupulous, sumptuous glee. The ten oil paintings featured still-life arrangements of dolls, decals, and other bric-a-brac that hover atop creamy, incandescent grounds. Like the Photorealists before her—who took pleasure in replicating, for instance, a Chrysler Sebring’s scintillating silver paint or a chrome napkin dispenser’s glint—Satlowski