Identities are constructed around borders that are themselves porous: identities not only border other identities, but ecologies, species, and objects as well. What is sometimes described as intersectionality might also be understood as interdependence: the vast network of relations—from microbiomes, to political economies, to geographies—in which any human subject is deeply enmeshed. In her work as both a visual artist and musician, Lisa Alvarado challenges the imposition of boundaries, whether between sight and sound, between Western traditions of abstract painting and Mexican textiles, or between home and displacement. Born and raised in the border region of San Antonio, Texas, Alvarado had earlier Mexican American, landowning family members deported during the 1929–36 Mexican Repatriation, some of whom returned to the United States as migrant laborers. She studied painting as an undergraduate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 2000s and experienced the city’s jazz and experimental music scenes, eventually joining Natural Information Society (led by Joshua Abrams), which self-describes as creating “long-form psychedelic environments informed by jazz, minimalism and traditional musics.” Contributing to this “psychedelic” quality are the series of paintings that Alvarado began producing for the band’s performances. Depending on the size of the stage, …

From houses scorched to the earth in Breezy Point, Queens, to homes completely swept away in Staten Island, when it came ashore late last month Hurricane Sandy wreaked unprecedented havoc on life as we know it in New York City. The storm cut off power for nearly a million New Yorkers, and tens of thousands remained without electricity, heat, or water for ten days or more. Artists, whose studios and galleries are disproportionately situated in coastal areas of Brooklyn and Manhattan like Red Hook, Dumbo, Greenpoint, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, and the East Village, have been among the hardest hit. Two weeks after the storm, a besieged Chelsea art district is slowly coming to grips with the hurricane’s immense personal and economic impact, in artworks ruined and high-season sales foregone. To put a figure on the losses is, for now, a futile exercise. The neighborhood’s largest art insurance company, AXA, has received $40 million in claims from its clients, but many galleries were not insured by AXA—or at all—and even among those that were, the above sum does not even include equipment and infrastructure damage. If there is good news for the area west of Tenth Avenue, between 19th and …