[American artists of all
kinds are responding to the coronavirus pandemic with new creations. As PBS NewsHour correspondent
Jeffrey Brown reports, the art can serve as both a call to action and a means
of healing—for maker and audience alike. The story below, which aired on Wednesday, 17 June 2020, is part of NewsHour’s ongoing arts and culture series, Canvas.]
Judy Woodruff: Finally tonight: American artists of
all kinds are responding to the pandemic with new creations.
As Jeffrey Brown reports, the art can be a call to action
and a means of healing for the maker and audience alike.
The story is part of our ongoing arts and culture series,
Canvas.
Jeffrey Brown: The song is called “Six Feet Apart,” a
kind of anthem for the pandemic. Country music star Luke Combs co-wrote it in
April, about a month into quarantine at his home in Tennessee.
Luke Combs: You know, I don’t want to come from a
place that is opportunistic or something that’s corny or cheesy. You want to
give people hope, I think, that this isn’t going to last forever.
Jeffrey Brown: Combs, a triple Platinum-selling
artist, would normally be on the road performing for thousands.
Luke Combs: I wanted to voice a little bit, I guess,
of my frustration with.
This was set up to be my biggest year of my career by a long
shot. And I’m sure there are millions of people around the world who feel the
same way about whatever their job is or their passion.
And anything that can give someone even three minutes’ worth
of relief from that is something that I’m really proud of.
Jeffrey Brown: Around the country, artistic responses
of all kinds.
Photographer Carrie Mae Weems, artist in residence at
Syracuse University, launched a campaign to raise awareness, combining images
of everyday life with direct messages on the need for precautions among people
of color, who are disproportionately affected by the virus: “Don’t worry, we
will hold hands again. Sadly, you are the most impacted by COVID-19.”
Sound artist Yuri Suzuki is collecting submissions for his
now-virtual installation Sound of the Earth: Pandemic Chapter, a partnership
with the Dallas Museum of Art.
To comfort critically ill patients, filmmaker Felipe Barral
created a piece call Bella, streaming the natural world. Different creative
ways to speak and act now.
In Queens, New York, one of the pandemic’s epicenters, a
meditation on the ghostly silence of the No. 7 subway line.
Frisly Soberanis: When are we going back to normal?
Jeffrey Brown: Twenty-six-year-old local artist
Frisly Soberanis shot this short video of the [elevated] tracks overhead.
Frisly Soberanis: The memories of the past come up
very often, and they just sort of slam in front of what I’m seeing.
I know the people that were moving here, the businesses that
were open, the energy of the space. And now I see it closed. And then I see
that this structure is still continuing to sort of tower over us.
Jeffrey Brown: Soberanis’ work is part of a large
instant exhibition involving many artists commissioned by the Onassis
Foundation, working with the Queens Museum and others. Soberanis normally makes
a living doing video and film work. That’s gone, and he and his extended family
face urgent financial and other challenges.
The pandemic has hit especially hard in his largely minority
and immigrant community, and heightened already profound societal inequities,
playing out further now in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. He’s
made those issues a focus of his art.
[note: George
Floyd, a 46-year-old African American truck driver and security guard, died in
police custody in Minneapolis on 25 May when a white police officer pressed his
knee to Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes during an arrest for allegedly
passing a counterfeit $20 bill.
[Weeks of protests, some of which turned violent, due mostly
to the actions of outside activists with agendas different from the protesters’,
followed and have led to a movement to change policing practices and attitudes
in the United States.]
Frisly Soberanis: I try to see the powers that are at
play at the moment that I’m creating things, whether that’s financial powers or
cultural powers. Art, at least for me, is essential to capture a moment before
it’s rewritten in a different way.
Jeffrey Brown: In Duluth, Minnesota, artist Carolyn
Olson is paying homage to her community with a vibrant series of portraits of
what she sees as essential workers, filling drugstore orders, picking vegetables
and fruits, delivering goods by bicycle, repairing a band student’s instrument.
Carolyn Olson: Just being angry and frustrated isn’t
going to fix anything. So I felt like it was something I could do. I’m a — I
can draw. I can paint. I could comment about the people that were doing this
kind of work and maybe bring light to it.
Jeffrey Brown: We learned of Olson’s work when she
wrote the “NewsHour” to say she’d found some of her subjects through stories
she’d seen on our program, a bus driver, a sanitation worker, first responders.
But most of her subjects are closer to home, including a
daughter who’s worked through this period at a grocery store.
Carolyn Olson: I asked my daughter one time about
what was going on and said, what about the grief?
And I felt like my drawing at least could talk about some of
the things that were going on.
Jeffrey Brown: Artists have always done this, of
course, including around pandemics of the past.
Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist whose Scream [The Scream, 1893] is a viral image of
our time, painted this self-portrait with the Spanish Flu in 1919, speaking
directly to his.
More recently, David Wojnarowicz photographed his friend
[photographer] Peter Hujar as he died of AIDS-related pneumonia [26 November 1987,
age 53].
[note: I have a
profile of artist Wojnarowicz (1954-92) on Rick On Theater, posted on 18 March
2011. There’s also a report on the Whitney Museum
of American Art’s retrospective David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at
Night, posted on 19 October 2018.
Munch gets a brief mention, as does his Scream, in my report on “The
‘New’ MoMA, 2019,” 1 January 2020.]
Choreographer Doug
Varone:
Doug Varone: I can think of the AIDS crisis. I can
think of 9/11. Artists respond to those moments. And this is no different. I
think artists are really driven by the times. Things occur in our lives, they
occur in the world around us, and we respond to them.
Jeffrey Brown: Varone and his company have been
presenting new works for more than 30 years, but COVID-19 took its toll. In
March, he furloughed his team until further notice.
Recently, he was asked to do something beyond his
experience, create a socially distanced dance, with Varone working in his
Upstate New York home, shown here on the small computer screen, and dancer
Michael Trusnovec using his home in New Jersey as his stage.
Doug Varone: The concept behind it has been very much
about the isolation that we all feel at.
And, for many people, you know, I have many friends who are
in this alone. This piece in many ways is speaking about that. The role of the
artist has always been to expand people’s perception of what is happening.
Jeffrey Brown: In another sign of the times, the work
will receive a virtual performance later in June.
For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown.
[I hesitated to download and
post this report. Because correspondent
Brown is essentially narrating a seven-minute video showing clips of the work
of the artists he names, reading the transcript misses a great deal of the interest
and impact in this story. I recommend,
therefore, that ROTters who are curious about
this artistic connection to the current medical crisis take a moment to watch
the NewsHour video at https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/connecting-through-art-when-a-pandemic-keeps-us-apart.]
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