salutation

When you learn to write letters, you’re told that the body is everything between the salutation and the closing.

Only April Ryan gave her a deadpan, sober salutation: “Welcome to the briefing room.”

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls” became a gender-neutral salutation to “dreamers of all ages.”

On Sept. 27, , police found an abandoned van, its exterior spray-painted with the salutation, “Welcome to Culiacán.”

Think of Leigh’s subsequent sculpture as a monument to its headless-ness — at once a mockery of Joséphine’s thoughtless ignorance and a captivating salutation to the actual power of symbolic resistance.