Chris Martin has a simple assignment for artists: keep a sketchbook, don’t show it to anyone, draw in it every day. But, like calisthenics, the simplest task, requiring no special equipment or expertise, can prove to be the most challenging.

“They were dead at my age,” remarked TM Davy (36) with an honest tone, to his friends Nicole Eisenman and Ellen Altfest in a panel discussion at his current show, Horses. Davy looks to great, queer artists, all of whom succumbed to AIDS—Hujar (died at age 53), Gonzalez-Torres (39), and Morrisroe (30)—to give himself permission.

Eisenman’s view is remarkably intimate. They are images of interiors and internal moments, even when surrounded by people. What relationship is safe enough to make it the subject of one’s work?

Drift, curated by the De Keyser scholar Ulrich Loock, marks the artist’s first major career survey in New York since his death in 2012. It is centered on The Last Wall (2014), De Keyser’s final project at age eighty-two.

John Walker’s large-format plein air paintings are existential images, like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952), and Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above Sea and Fog (1818).

At first glance, Bushwick looks like a collection of random, disconnected artists from all over the country who came to New York to “make it.” They came to this neighborhood for its abundance of available studio space, and a community developed organically simply because of proximity.