“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.

In conjunction with its current exhibition, Gutai: Splendid Playground, the Guggenheim has developed a participatory website, Please Draw Freely, which invites users to create drawings in collaboration with living Gutai artists.

“The Curator’s Office, with its cigarette butts and coffee stains, is like a crime scene, motivating the viewer to uncover the identity left behind by this illusive figure,” says Mark Dion of his installation in the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s More Real show.

“A weapon kills people and makes people in cities dominated by fear,” says Pedro Reyes of his Disarm project, in which he turns guns into music-makers. “But if you turn it into an instrument, it’s like social gold. It brings people together and you build trust.”

China-born Cai Guo-Qiang, who makes pyrotechnic artworks meant to be seen from space, says he moved to the US because NASA’s here: “I was attracted to anything that would bring me closer to the universe—and the universe closer to me.”