In August 2020, immigrants hoping to cross from Tijuana, Mexico, into San Diego over the San Ysidro border had to queue in la línea (the line) for up to ten hours. The temperatures in San Ysidro that month reached the mid-nineties, and, according to local news stations, people became “desperate” for bathrooms. On the twenty-third of that month, an eighty-nine-year-old woman died, apparently of cardiac arrest, while enduring the wait in her car.

Such tragedies of the United States immigration system inspired “Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento,” a startling and brilliant group

Writing in his 1993 book The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, Wayne Koestenbaum asserted, “I hypothesize that opera’s hypnotic hold over modern gay audiences has some connection to the erotic interlocking of words and music, two contrary symbolic systems with gendered attributes.” Mariah Garnett seemed to test this conceit in her recent exhibition, “A Heart of Opal Fire,” which featured an ambitious new video installation that takes on opera, gender, mental health, family history, exoticization, and queer love—namely, a tryst between a woman and a rock. Garnett’s

Thornton Dial’s nearly thirty-year career in the art world began in the late 1980s, when the artist was then approaching his sixtieth birthday. This show of about a dozen works, titled “Thornton Dial: The Earliest Years, 1987–1989” and curated by writer and artist Phillip March Jones, took us back to that moment and to an oft-repeated origin tale—one that featured prominently in Dial’s 2016 </span>New York Times obituary. The story goes that Dial didn’t make artworks or even fully grasp the concept of what those in the know might call “high art” until he was visited at his home in Bessemer,