“Dancing woman” on bone from 4th–5th century Egypt. Included in “Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt” a show organized by @dreaachi and Akili Tommasino just under @metmuseum’s Grand Staircase (originally was used as a storehouse for iron metalwork). The project pairs Byzantine works with contemporary art, including reliquaries, fragments, memorials, and other remains used to ward off evil. In this tight hang, I felt the curators channeling art’s longing for everlasting life and also art’s grappling with the fact that everything will be taken away, pace Dr Adrian Piper whose work of that name is installed throughout the museum. Once you’re both, you’ll always be both, or Käthe Kollwitz’s 1910 “Death, Woman, and Child,” a trio made with two figures. In @starrfig’s retrospective of the artist’s work, immeasurable grief is only matched by immeasurable love: an atmosphere and nearly all-grey palette that binds our time to hers. In works like this, which Kollwitz made after her son Hans almost died of diphtheria, the show narrates key moments when the bond of mother and child was also inseparable from the need to make art—then and now, genres of desire enforced as discrete from one another and thus capable of hierarchization. It’s also filled with studies like this one where you can see the artist trying to figure things out: just how tight to make the grip at the neck, or how to create an icon within the image for us to later have the quasi-devotional feeling that we’re peering into shared breath. Kollwitz used her own face for this portrait of the archetype of a woman; in her self-portraits (which stare out at us and bracket the show) I found myself beginning with myself, imagining and then trying to picture a response to a world animated by loss.