First Look: Black Artist Burnout

At the New Museum, *First Look: Mezzanine* is presented as a live, in-person program that treats the museum itself as a working site rather than a neutral backdrop. The event sits between exhibition and performance, using the “mezzanine” as both a physical level and a metaphor for in-between states: public and private, finished and unfinished, watching and being watched. In New York’s long tradition of performance-forward institutions downtown, it reads as a continuation of that lineage, with a cool, self-aware attention to how cultural spaces choreograph behavior.