Eighty-five years ago, in what remains an obscure episode within the histories of abstraction, painters Raymond Jonson and Emil Bisttram (the latter of whom founded the Taos School of Art in New Mexico) formed the Transcendental Painting Group. They attracted artists such as Lawren Harris, William Lumpkins, and Agnes Pelton with their call for a kind of modernist vision quest born of archetypal imagery mined from the collective unconscious. Yoked to spiritual seeking, the TPG’s manifesto charged painting to move “beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color,

The endless courage of trans and queer people to make themselves seen and heard within this fucked-up and increasingly fascist chapter of our shared history is nothing short of miraculous. “Make Me Feel Mighty Real: Drag/Tech and the Queer Avatar,” a group show at Honor Fraser, should best be understood as an altar erected in tribute to that miracle—a jewel-encrusted, blasphemous smooch planted on the stiletto heel of the Divine.

Positing drag as a primary technology in constructing social and lived worlds, the exhibition’s cocurators—Jamison Edgar, the gallery’s director, and Scott Ewalt, a New