Some of that reshaping should also be evident in “Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North,” at the American Folk Art Museum (Nov. 15-March 24, 2024). This landmark effort will explore Black visual culture in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states from 1780 to 1850 in a presentation of around 125 portrait and landscape paintings, photographs, prints, needlework and stoneware jars, along with a 300-page catalog. Two of the New York’s most cherished alternative spaces, both founded in 1972, are staging solo surveys of pioneering artists of different generations and distinctly dissimilar sensibilities. Tiravanija (born in 1961) threw down the gauntlet in the 1990s with SoHo gallery exhibitions in which he made and served pad Thai (1990, at Paula Allen) and Thai vegetable curry (1992, at 303 Gallery). Much followed in several different mediums, from T-shirts proclaiming “Fear Eats the Soul,” after Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film, to chrome sculptures of furniture, with the best operating at the intersection of collective pleasure and political consciousness.

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Persons: “ Rirkrit, Paula Allen, ”, Werner Fassbinder’s Organizations: American Folk Art Museum Locations: American, ”, New England, SoHo