I arrived at Circus of Books without the slightest clue I was walking into LA queer history. The store has since closed, but a new documentary, Circus of Books, explores its 33-year life and the story of its unlikely proprietors, Karen and Barry Mason, a straight and straight-laced Jewish couple. The movie’s director is their daughter Rachel, a multi-disciplinary artist who made a previous film in 2013, The Lives of Hamilton Fish.

“My paintings used to be dense and layered, and lately I’m separating out the parts.” This was Keltie Ferris’s remark in a September 2015 interview with Jason Stopa about her exhibition that year with Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds (2018) is subdivided by a tree whose branches spread across the canvas, filling it with foliage painted by means of closely packed green dots, patches of sky denoted by blue dots, and passages of red dots interspersed throughout. Written inside of a branch, the width of the rectangle, is the line “Four and twenty blackbirds—baked in a pie, oh my oh my!” Williams pushes this nursery rhyme into more troubling territory through the presence of the tree, which for Williams is an inescapable image of lynching.

In his new exhibition of 40 works, Chase’s black male Venuses are bathed in warm yellows, tropical indigo and ultramarine, and rich purples. The men are romantic but not romanticized.

In Star Death and The Pain Body, Rachel Mason tunes both visual and aural experience to create a sacral space where we perceive, for a moment, the unknown outside and within us.