The stairs descending to the Under St. Marks Theater lend a sense of entering a clandestine world. This may be because the worn black box is situated in a basement, and its shabbiness feels like an emblem of underground, East Village cool. But more likely it’s because I’m about to see nudity.

I came to see the show, but I missed the militia. They were here at the opening, dressed like revolutionary war soldiers, guarding the artwork. This seems only appropriate for a show titled White Like Me. White like the artist, David Ford. White like the men who founded this country and fought the revolutionary war.

Vacuum cleaners, sewing machines, chairs, guns. These are just a few of the objects I envisioned while looking at Laurent Ajina’s works in his recent solo show at Dam, Stuhltrager. I also saw transformers and large factories. I even thought I glimpsed an entire city.

For Anika Wilson’s solo painting show, A Question of Beauty, Gallery QB posted only one picture on its website—the artist’s acrylic on canvas, “Pink.” In this painting, nearly twenty nude female bodies, each with two heads, are clustered in the top right corner as if in motion, their white bodies falling onto the pink surface from an unseen sky. The pairs of heads, rather than looking inward towards one another, look outward in opposite directions, with their chins tilted slightly up. The painting intrigued me and drew me to the gallery.

I’ve always found the term ‘street artist’ somewhat suspect. Yes, the label is apt for someone who paints graffiti on building walls or places paper sculptures on city sidewalks, and yet we don’t go around calling artists who show in galleries, ‘gallery artists.’ Those people are just artists. They don’t need a descriptor, a qualifying moniker.