Eleanor Antin is one of the odder humans. She’s a photography, video, installation, and performance artist, an inventor of personas. She was, for a time in the ’70s, a bearded King wandering Solana Beach near San Diego. Later, she was a Crimean War nurse and a black Ballets Russes ballerina. Her own life began in the radical politics of her Bronx Jewish family, with a Stalinist mother and socialist father. In today’s rare appearance at Seattle Art Museum, she’ll be enacting scenes from her that-couldn’t-possibly-be-true memoir, Conversations with Stalin. She’s brilliant and she’s 78 years old. (Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, seattleartmuseum.org, 2–3 pm, $12)

Jen Graves (The Stranger’s former arts critic) mostly writes about things you approach with your eyeballs. But she’s also a history nerd interested in anything that needs more talking about, from male...