Performance Space’s exhibition title, Who Wants to be Human All the Time, quotes Acker, referencing her impatient, sardonic escapism. But Kraus’ depiction of her is decidedly human, painstakingly tracing the ambitious, often needy, and furiously disciplined writer through the agonizingly slow and not at all certain path to fame and success.

A fixture in New York’s downtown scene throughout the 1970s, Jayne County was—in her own words— “the first completely full-blown, in-your-face queen to stand up on a rock'n'roll stage,” fronting various glam and punk bands at CBGB, the 82 Club, Max’s Kansas City, and other underground venues.

Just inside the entrance to Art AIDS America, Marlon Riggs’s fifty-five minute Tongues Untied (1989) is projected on a large wall within its own gallery, playing on a continuous loop for the duration of the show.

The title of the powerful new Martin Wong retrospective at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Human Instamatic, refers to the artist’s period as a street portraitist in Eureka, California in the late 1960s and early 1970s where, after graduating from college, he offered up his photographic services for $5 a pop.

Now on view at the Queens Museum is a long-overdue retrospective of the New York-based artist Zhang Hongtu. Curated by Luchia Meihua Lee, the show contains nearly 100 works, alongside archival and source material, highlighting works from every major period in the artist’s career from the late 1950s to the present.