Sensitive to Art & its Discontents
This is the 198th installment of a series in which artists send in a photo and a description of their workspace. In light of COVID-19, we’ve asked participants to reflect on how the pandemic has impacted their studio space and/or if their work process has changed while quarantining. Want to take part? Please submit your studio! Just check out the submission guidelines.
My art practice during the pandemic became complicated by the lack of studio time, as my once-standard working hours got exchanged with taking care of the kids. Simultaneously, my need to create got heightened; the need to express and react to this new strange state of affairs felt full of urgency.
Slowly I found fulfillment in the small marks I added to my sketchbooks. Sometimes the opportunity would come while my kids were playing in the yard, sometimes while sitting by my kindergartner during his online school meetings. The daily routines became more fluid. There was more time, and yet less rest for the mind. I started getting up at 5am to make up for the lost studio time. I became more prolific. Small sketches turned into large paintings. Lately, I often wonder if I will remember this period of togetherness and reflect on it even with a sense of nostalgia, once my studio resumes being again just that — a studio. No longer a makeshift classroom for my five-year-old brother-in-arms.
The quarantine has helped me to become an artist, once again. Before teaching art for 30 years and before having children, I thought of myself as an artist. Later I became more of an artist-in-waiting. The beginning of the pandemic found me in a web of obligations which the quarantine released me from. What remained was so simple; daily walks in the woods and painting. I took pictures of trees on almost every walk and now feel that I have a lifetime of visual inspiration and a deeper connection to nature. I have quieted down and am able to hear myself better and understand more of where my artistic ideas come from. My studio has become the focus of my days and my life.
Each tree portrait has coincidentally taken about a month to complete, so these paintings also represent a passage of quarantine time. Happily, I do not see an end to this artistic exploration. As the vaccinations make social gathering possible I will strive to remember what I have learned by keeping my life simple and art a priority … as an artist should.
I’m messy while I work; you’ll find stacks and fragments on my table. This is a split shot of two work areas at my home that have shifted only a little during the pandemic. My studio spaces can’t easily generate romanticized mental images of the artist, nor are they segregated greatly from the daily activity of home life. That has been my long-standing practice — I value recognizing the mundane and “everyday” as significant to my practice. That recognition grew this year.
On the left is a small printing press, stacks of handwoven paper (waiting for chine-collé images, paper-cut silhouettes, or to be cut into sculpture parts), my clothing iron to heat-press paper, various knives, a linoleum-cut gouge, pens, and other tools. On the right is a table saw placed underneath the overhang of my house. I use it year-round to mill cedar and other logs for bent-wood lamination. The rug on top protects the saw and allows for sanding and staining surfaces for the bent pieces that you can see stacked on top. I’m currently building a predator bird in fancy feathers.
An outpouring of memes is helping Ukrainians cope through humor that often spills over into dark satire.
Informed by the legacies of Standing Rock and the January 6 insurrection, the artist grapples with ideas around site and his own agency.
This exhibition at the museum’s New York City location introduces new generations to one of the 20th century’s most innovative Native American painters.
This week, the oldest mummies in the world, whitewashing an autocrat, a useful reading list about Ukraine, SPLC released their new report on hate, seeking a new language around race, and more.
One thing that comes across in the drawings of Rackstraw Downes is the austere, almost monastic life he has lived in order to make art.
The fair kicks off its 20th anniversary celebrations in New York with its Spring Edition, taking place in Chelsea from March 23 through March 27.
Artist Maya Stovall questions the altruistic intentions of anthropology while also attempting to redefine the discipline as a site of creativity and community empowerment.
Rather than accentuating his radicalism, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition makes Jacques-Louis David a compelling case study in opportunism and survival.
Gideon Appah’s paintings merge his interest in Ghanaian popular culture with his own imagination, dreams, and fantasies. Now on view in Richmond, Virginia.
The notion of stories, bodies, and selves that change incrementally and radically as they repeat pervades the mesmerizing world of Glaessner’s Phantom Tail.
“Mali Magic,” by Google Arts & Culture, features 40,000 manuscripts that have survived the 10-month occupation and destruction of the city of Timbuktu.
Fossils suggest that Asian mammals “invaded” Europe by crossing over a landmass that is now being called “Balkanatolia.”
Elisa Wouk Almino is a senior editor at Hyperallergic. She is based in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram. More by Elisa Wouk Almino
Hyperallergic is a forum for serious, playful, and radical thinking about art in the world today. Founded in 2009, Hyperallergic is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York.