Inside the Queens Museum, direct action takes different forms. Xavier Simmons, as part of her exhibition Crisis Makes a Book Club, has deposited a dark rune in the central atrium. Within the black structure, video of landscapes root the viewer in the natural world; its outer walls writhe with supergraphic declarations of the unnatural state of whiteness. “It took generations and a vast amount of coercion before this became a white country,” one corner holds. Coercion is required to “unbecome,” as well: through a series of wall projections, Simmons forces the museum’s food pantry program to examine its own complicity in maintaining systems of poverty. A second, complementary exhibition, Charisse Pearlina Weston’s of [a] tomorrow: lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust, explores Black tactics of refusal in protests at the 1964 World’s Fair, staged a few yards from where the museum now sits. In the first of two galleries, Weston sets an angled glass ceiling too low to pass under, a transparent barrier where a passage once flowed. The spiky sculptural shards in the adjoining space are imprinted with the negatives of faintly legible newspaper articles about the protests. For both shows (open through March 5, 2023), history isn’t just written on the walls, but in and of them.