“Distance,” writes Marwa Helal, is the story “ive always wanted to tell. / so, ill tell it now” (“let’s get this out of the way”).

The exhibition is a bold curatorial collaboration: Gatson and Khan shine both individually and together at Jenkins Johnson Projects, a Prospect Heights art space connected to the community around it and highlighting artists of color.

In a lush new series of works at Rubber Factory, Bushwick-based artist Jon Key layers personal realities, myths, and acrylic paint in the spaces between body and landscape.

The Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art (MOTHA), a semi-fictional institution led by Chris E. Vargas, counters the stable, hetero/cis-normative, “serious” structure of the museum with fluid, playful objects and images that center trans people, narratives, and subjectivities. Vargas’s project Transgender Hirstory in 99 Objects began in 2015 and now continues at the New Museum in an exhibition entitled curated by Johanna Burton and Sara O’Keeffe.

My partner and I were recently tested for HIV at a local clinic that doubles as a thrift store. The test was free, and our negative results were instant.