Rewriting History

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…