I’ve just returned to New York from my annual pilgrimage to the Zoo, where every May Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo hosts a cadre of monks, neopagans, cosplayers, and Tolkien lovers, in addition to a few medievalists. Three days of academic panels, working groups, and business meetings culminate with “The Dance,” where, if you’re anything like me, you’ll take the opportunity to kiss a beautiful Hispanist, whom you won’t see again till next year. It’s rather like summer camp that way.

The latest in a series of recent solo exhibitions featuring contemporary artists who explore not only figural art, but specifically historical—and thoroughly canonized—representation forms showcases Gabriela Vainsencher’s playful ceramic riffs on ancient Greek and Minoan aesthetics. Now on view at Asya Geisberg Gallery, these artworks offer her an unexpected avenue for feminist reflections on motherhood and the maternal body.

Sig Olson’s first solo exhibition This Has Happened, curated by art historian Ksenia M. Soboleva, leads with an ambitious thesis. Per Soboleva’s introduction to the exhibition’s zine, Olson’s current work is a trauma response. These artworks, on view in the second room at the Tappeto Volante gallery in Gowanus, might be described in general terms as abstraction—color-field paintings on paper.

Visitors will likely come to Tirtzah Bassel’s exciting new exhibition Canon in Drag with an expectation of gender inversion and playful camp—and Bassel doesn’t disappoint.