The Lower East Side / East Village / SoHo cluster this month is, secretly, a single argument spread across six venues. Sacha Ingber conjoins ceramics into bodies that share a common interior — meaning lives in the channel between two vessels, not in either one. Lucia Hierro packs grief into sculptural boxes: the contents of her parents’ lives after their deaths, compressed into Minimalist containers that quote Judd and Oldenburg while doing something those men never attempted.

Jill Magid engraved 120,000 pennies with ’THE BODY WAS ALREADY SO FRAGILE’ on their edges — the one surface of American currency free from government inscription — and released them into bodega transactions to circulate for forty years. Margaret Curtis returns to New York after 23 years away, making paintings in which the figure is both present and withheld. And Julie Mehretu, up Broadway at Marian Goodman, makes translucent paintings that shadows literally pass through — a hauntology in the oldest sense: the past is not behind us, it is still moving through.

These artists don’t illustrate ideas about the body, economy, or memory. They make objects that are those things. Walk this itinerary and you’re walking through a single sustained meditation on what it means to carry something — history, grief, fragility — in material form.