{"id":13531,"date":"2021-05-05T14:53:24","date_gmt":"2021-05-05T18:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/?p=13531"},"modified":"2021-05-11T10:03:45","modified_gmt":"2021-05-11T14:03:45","slug":"the-art-of-the-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/the-art-of-the-pandemic\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of the Pandemic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Right now, I think it\u2019s too early to know the impact of COVID-19 on art and visual culture. But what keeps coming to mind is the AIDS epidemic and the direct parallels that artists are already making to COVID-19. Last semester, one of my students, David Rogers \u201920, delivered a thoughtful presentation about graphic design used for social change. He looked at advocacy designs through the AIDS epidemic, but then he brought in COVID-19\u2014because in both instances in the United States, we had a federal government that was ignoring or downplaying the impact of these health crises on the national populace. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first major exhibition to look at AIDS in the United States wasn\u2019t until 2015, and New York Times <\/em>art critic Holland Cotter asked, \u201cWhat took so long?\u201d Why did it take us so long to address this disease that impacted such a large part of the population?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a way that art records what\u2019s happening. There\u2019s a way that artists work through what they\u2019re experiencing. There\u2019s a way that artists look at their past work as resonating again now, which I\u2019ve seen. And there\u2019s a way that they create this psychological working through. That\u2019s why I say it\u2019s so early\u2014we don\u2019t know the trauma that people are going to come out of this with as a whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can\u2019t disconnect the trauma of COVID-19 from the social justice movements like Black Lives Matter that are going on, especially as we see how COVID-19 affects different communities disproportionately. The ways that we represent and understand recent social justice events and the way that we understand those events are deeply embedded and connected to the way we understand and are experiencing COVID-19 as a disease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Very early on in the pandemic we lost two very important art history scholars. One was Maurice Berger, a curator and an art critic. He was very important in pointing out the racial and class biases in the art world throughout his career. He died in March. Artist and curator David Driskell was very important in recognizing and telling the history of African American art. He died in April. Their voices are now gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Berger\u2019s husband, curator and writer Marvin Heiferman, also connected to photography, has been sharing his journey of grief through photographs on social media, with captions like: \u201cThis is my first day sleeping in our bedroom again; this is my first time returning back to our New York City apartment.\u201d He has even shown images of the ambulance and the emergency team about to use a helicopter to take Maurice away, but it was too late.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that\u2019s what some people don\u2019t understand about art and visual culture. It\u2019s not just pretty pictures on your wall. It\u2019s recording what things have happened. It\u2019s visual language used to communicate. It\u2019s strange to look at Heiferman\u2019s photos because it feels, in one sense, voyeuristic, but he\u2019s putting them out there for us to see as he mourns. And then if we just take a step back we can see that this is not an isolated incident; it connects to the larger public moments of trauma.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Corey Dzenko, art historian and associate professor of art and design.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":13534,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"image_focus":"","hide_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features"],"thumbnail":"\"\"","catString":"Features","issue":"Spring 2021","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13531"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13792,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13531\/revisions\/13792"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}