This has been a despicable year, but not without its silver linings. The puppy population of New York City soared, Biden beat Trump, and the truth-to-power urgency of Black Lives Matter finally became undeniable. But to reflect on the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others—including the more than three hundred thousand lives lost to COVID-19 in the U.S.—returns us to the annus horribilis.
In early December, Pantone named its official colors for 2021, a decision that seemed to channel both the bleakness and the bright spots of the past year, not to mention the brain freeze of indecision that 2020 levels of uncertainty induced. Instead of championing one color, as it has in the past, Pantone anointed two: “Ultimate Gray,” a dispiriting fog, and “Illuminating,” a sunny yellow. The Internet was quick to point out that the combo also called to mind a banana and duct tape, the materials of Maurizio Cattelan’s infamous contribution to the 2019 edition of Art Basel Miami. The thought of that infuriatingly brilliant one-liner (now in the collection of the Guggenheim) makes me almost nostalgic for the vacuous hoopla of art fairs.
It’s hard to believe that, in the first week of March, eight fairs did descend on New York City, for Armory Week. A number of overseas galleries made the trip, as they usually do, but the news from Europe was already worrisome, and some handshakes were being politely declined, from the Park Avenue Armory to Piers 90 and 94. (Belated apologies to the prescient collector whose offer of an elbow bump I greeted with side-eye.) On March 18th, it was announced that the Met was temporarily closing its three branches; a state-mandated shutdown of nonessential businesses soon followed.
For months, looking at art became staring at screens, and a new three-letter acronym entered the lexicon: O.V.R., for “online viewing room.” If that sounds like an enticement to see artists envision new forms with digital means, downgrade your expectations to “slideshow.” Still, the art world has been luckier than other cultural sectors of New York City. Museums and galleries reopened this fall, and there were fewer closures of the latter than feared, although one did mark the end of an era. After twenty-six years as an independent tastemaker, the British expat Gavin Brown closed his enterprises and took a job with the doyenne Barbara Gladstone.
Perhaps the happiest art news of this dismal year is that intrepid new galleries continue to open. Another silver lining of 2020 is the reassurance that art is unstoppable. The following is a list of some beacons that cut through the pandemic blur.
Morgan Bassichis
In March, this irresistibly charismatic New York-based performer—whose sui-generis style blends cabaret panache and standup shtick with grace notes of klezmer—made us feel less alone when he began posting his comforting “quarantunes” on Instagram. Like the full-length performances that have earned Morgan Bassichis a loyal following from Fire Island to the Whitney Museum, the intimate clips were funny, strange, exquisitely sung, and unexpectedly moving. Onstage, Bassichis often repeats simple lyrics—“I know you’re scared; I’m scared, too”—until they accrue the power of incantations. The quarantunes had that same magic, along with some good advice for bad times: “I’ll tell you the secret. Take a shower.” If you feel like laughing out loud, read “The Odd Years,” Bassichis’s purple book of to-do lists, published by Wendy’s Subway.
Farah Al Qasimi
When the Public Art Fund invited the Emirati photographer Farah Al Qasimi to conceive of a project for spaces usually reserved for advertisements on a hundred bus shelters citywide, she came up with “Back and Forth Disco,” a series of seventeen effervescent color pictures, taken in New York City neighborhoods favored by immigrants. Although the project went up in January, it delivered the most delight in the early months of the pandemic, when walking outside was one of the remaining joys of city life. Spotting Qasimi’s picture of a white cockatoo in a curtain store in Ridgewood, Queens, on a bus shelter on Hudson Street in Manhattan felt almost as exciting as spotting a vibrant Western tanager in a tree along the Hudson River.
Between Bridges
Countless artists banded together throughout the COVID crisis to support essential causes. Some turned to making masks (Stephanie Syjuco, in the Bay Area; Beth Lipman and Ken Sager, in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin). On Juneteenth, the photographers’ coalition See in Black (founded by Joshua Kissi and Micaiah Carter) launched a benefit for organizations “working to dismantle systemic, race-based oppression.” And, from April to August, more than fifty participants—including Glenn Ligon, Thomas Struth, and Carrie Mae Weems—designed posters under the auspices of Between Bridges, to help ninety-eight struggling art spaces, music venues, and residencies around the world. The prevailing spirit was hope, tinged with romance, as seen in Nicole Eisenman’s wistful closing-time scene, “Never Forget Kissing in Bars.”
Monumental Changes
In late June, the American Museum of Natural History made the clear-eyed decision to remove a statue of three men from its front steps: Theodore Roosevelt, looming, on horseback, over an indigenous and a Black figure. New York City has more work to do to rectify racism in its public art, but several new projects are under way, including a soaring silhouette of the U.S. congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, by Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous. For now, Simone Leigh’s sixteen-foot-tall monument to Black womanhood, “Brick House”—the inaugural commission of the High Line Plinth—keeps vigil above Tenth Avenue at West Thirtieth Street.
Jacob Lawrence
