What made you feel grateful for in 2020? I loved 2020 in only one way, it brought me to a closer realization of the strength of creativity. Artists here in Santa Barbara—and worldwide—answered the challenge of the Pandemic. They addressed social ills in ways we never saw before.
I’m indebted to ArtNews for engaging me with the following discoveries through the year 2020:
Artist David Hockey, high risk at 82, quarantined in the dead of winter. Unable to paint, he created a series of drawings of Normandy flowers on his iPad for the public. He called it “Do remember they can’t cancel the Spring.”- “Get Well Soon”…a massive work of art created by a real-life list of pleas on Go Fund Me for fundraising help amidst the Pandemic from 200,000 Americans with severe health issues. A reflection of a broken system in a broken year by artists Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain.
- Installation Art that morphed: Party/afterParty, created by DJ/producer Carl Craig in early March 2020 showed the immense industrial basement of upstate New York’s Día Beacon Museum as a semi deserted dance club. The soundscape strains of wispy electro-tech music set to haunting low lights. No one can bring themselves to dismantle the piece today almost a year later. Its meaning changed from pre-pandemic flavor of a captured event to a sad goodbye to music enjoyed TOGETHER, perhaps forever.
- In January 2020, in Wuhan, China, artist Ai Weiwei KNEW the pandemic would become earth-shattering. He shot his documentary, aptly called Coronation, showing Wuhan as a completely altered city. All cities fast became Wuhan shortly thereafter.
“For Freedom,” a huge artist’s collective, launched a 50-state billboard campaign this Fall to get out the vote, drawing on the talents of 85 street-savvy artists across the nation. Their inspiration? -drawn from the movement 160 years ago called the “Wide Awakes,” supporting Abraham Lincoln.- Indigenous Alaskan artist Nicholas Galanin turned the toppling of public sculptures of controversial generals, statesmen, and captains of the past upside down. Galanin dug out a shallow but massive area of grass in a public park in Sydney Australia in the shape of a grounded towering obelisk ‘honoring’ a discredited 19h century “hero,” Captain Cook. The huge silhouette is surrounded by crime screen tape. Title? “Shadow on the Land.”
- On the 4th of July 2020, in the blue skies above 80 US detention centers and prisons nationwide, a group of artists commandeered airplanes that sky typed messages, such as “Not Forgotten.” Sky typing creates letters emitted upon computer command and a plane’s exhaust creates dots that make words. Why so powerful? The blurring of the smoking words as they merge with the sky, unseen.
- Garrett Bradley’s Time won the Sundance Film Festival Documentary Award 2020. The film shows home style movies of a family beset by generations of the cycle of incarceration in Louisiana prisons. Those that wait at home the hardest hit.
Even Big Fashion recognized the powerful merger of art and activism. Vogue and Vanity Fair, on three covers in September, featured black artists painting black females. One of which was slain Breonna Taylor, by artist Amy Sherald. WOW.- The George Floyd protests echoed in street art and murals on hundreds of thousands of public walls thought Europe, the US, and Africa. Artists enlisted the help of community members to support the Black Lives Matter Movement through art, many creating major works of public art with a list of the slain, and the slogan “Say Our Names.”
If it doesn’t move you, it isn’t art.
I wish you the very best of creativity, out of the box thinking, peace, health, and friendship in 2021.