Diamonds, aliens, a Michael Jackson mask, the mirhab motif in Islamic architecture: In a new segment by The Playlist, Andy Messerschmidt discusses the visual influences in his art, including his new Walker installation, Graze Anatomy.

“I’m not an ecologist, but I like the idea of recycling in terms of specific needs,” says Abraham Cruzvillegas, whose series of found-object assemblages shares its name with a DIY building process in the Mexico City neighborhood of his youth. Autoconstrucción is “about scarcity and solutions, ingenuity, and how you can conceive a philosophy of life—that you can make things out of nothing.”

With the death of Margaret Thatcher, Rozalia Jovanovic looks at the flap over Hans Haacke’s 1984 Taking Stock (unfinished), a portrait of the PM that features plates bearing the faces of campaign ad men and artworld bigwigs, Charles and Maurice Saatchi.

“Culturally, I’m a cold-hearted colonialist,” says Andy Messerschmidt, whose work borrows ideas from world religions, from Buddhist mandalas to Indonesian shamanistic rituals to American holidays, in his art. The tendency is on display in his new Walker commission, which he says explores the “compression of loaded symbols of divinity and how they work in moire to create a meta-symbol of the divine.”

“Making art by relying on your own resources cuts you out from a crowd that is begging for cash to do anything,” says artist Richard Jackson. “Fostering independence in yourself, wherever you are, can be more isolating than working up in the mountains.”

With SCOTUS considering the constitutionality of DOMA, Facebook users are showing solidarity for marriage equality through profile pics that riff on the iconic equals sign—with everything from a Rothko painting to a pair of cans of Bud making appearances.

By the time Jean-Michel Basquiat and Alexis Adler broke up in 1980, the then-budding artist had used the walls of Adler’s East Village home as a canvas. Now Adler is revealing these works, along with photos and ephemera, for the first time.