Photo by Lindsey B. King2020: The Year That Changed Everything

Coloradans took to the streets this year to fight against police brutality and structural racism. But 2020 didnt make it easy, as advocacy organizations were forced to adjust how they planned protests.

There were plenty of tears in the crowd. They were streaming down Black womens faces until the liquid pain trickled behind their brightly colored face masks. Gathered near the Colorado State Capitol, women took turns telling stories of dead family members, exhaustion, and fearfear for their children, their brothers, their friends, and their partners. In 2020, there were more reasons than ever for the March for Black Women Denver to come together to rally for racial equity. Unfortunately, there were also many reasons not to.

Protesting and organized marching arent new to the Mile High CityDenver hosted one of the countrys largest womens marches in 2017 but the murder of George Floyd, an out-of-control pandemic, and a contentious election cycle have encouraged Coloradans to voice their concerns with more urgency and frequency this year. In years past, however, the March for Black Women Denver would have sounded, looked, and felt very different. Along with all the other changes 2020 has brought with it, this year has also necessarily altered the way protest planners have had to organize their events.

That is, of course, if they even felt comfortable staging in-person events. The Womxns March Denver canceled its October rally and pivoted from rallying in the streets to encouraging a parade to the polls in November. It also set up moderated panels and other smaller eventsmost held in virtual settings.

For some organizations, however, the risks of gathering were far outweighed by the need to capitalize on the national zeitgeist surrounding racial equity. The March for Black Women Denver and Black Lives Matter 5280 had to modify their programming and enforce strict social distancing protocols. Temperatures were taken, masks were required, and hugging was discouragednot only because those measures are widely known to help stop the spread of the virus, but also because COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Black and brown people in Colorado and across the country. Although it pained organizers to scuttle their usual lineup of deejayed dance parties, free food, and a long list of speakers, they dutifully replaced events that engendered too much close togetherness with programming that allowed for social distancing, like quiet reflections, long marches through Denvers streets, and impromptu speeches from members of the community. In the past we have been able to really have community and be in close proximity with each other, says Tiya Trent, one of the organizers of the March for Black Women Denver. Laughing, dancing, huggingwe really didnt get to do a lot of that this year. We wanted to make sure that the people who chose to show up were safe.

COVID-19 wasnt the only safety issue event planners had to think about, though. Considering protesters physical safetyfrom law enforcement, counter-protesters, and random dissentershas always been a priority. That concern was heightened this year. Theres always been a risk in Black women gathering, says Shontel Lewis, another organizer for the March for Black Women, who explains how Black women have long been susceptible to violence, whether through their relationships or at the hands of police. But this is 2020. With all the agitators and antagonists against the movement, we felt that it was best to take a few more safety precautions. The Black women who chose to speak were physically surrounded by Black men and white allies. There was an effort to protect and shield, something Black women have had to live without for a long time, Lewis says.

Black Lives Matter 5280 orchestrated four marches in 2020. But local organizers didnt stop there: They also continued to focus on traditional tacticslike fundraising and community educationthat have always been part of Black Lives Matter 5280s mission. We have been modeling after our ancestors before us and the types of direct actions that they engaged in, whether thats formal protest, or other forms of direct action, like different forms of collective action in fundraising efforts, says Apryl Alexander, a professor at the University of Denver and BLM 5280 Community organizer. I think there are some things that changed with 2020 and a lot of things that didnt change.

What has changed, according to multiple organizers, is the response theyve received to their work. Black Lives Matter 5280 has been able to work with far more people this year than ever before; its marches were heavily attended; and their fundraisers elicited more donations than in previous years. What the tragic events of 2020 havent changed, planners say, is the fight for Black rights. Alexander explains that 2020 has only changed the reactions Americans are having to the movement. And there are upsides and downsides to that: White allies are paying more attention, but white supremacists are becoming more emboldened.

Organizers say theyll deal with the need for increased safety measures and take the good response with the bad so long as the increased interest in social justice doesnt fade away when 2020 comes to an end. My biggest fear is that people forget, because thats happened in movements before, Alexander says. I fear that people wont continue to engage in the action thats needed to abolish systemic and institutional racism.

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How 2020 Changed the Way That Protests Are Organized - 5280 | The Denver Magazine

Viola Davis, Colman Domingo on the Importance of Telling August Wilson's Stories on Screen (Exclusive)

With the arrival of Ma Raineys Black Bottom on Netflix, playwright August Wilsons celebration of Black lives once again takes center stage. The film, produced by Denzel Washington and starring Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman and Colman Domingo, chronicles the day in the life of the legendary blues singer and her backing band as they record music one afternoon in the 1920s. It also marks the second time one of Wilsons award-winning plays has been adapted for the screen. The first, of course, being Fences, which Washington produced, directed and starred in.The two-time Oscar winnerhas also made it his mission to make movie versions of Wilsons 10 plays, known as the Pittsburgh Cycle.

Also referred to as the Century Cycle, nine of the 10plays depict different generations of African Americans living in Pittsburghs Hill District, with the other, Ma Raineys Black Bottom, being set in Chicago and focused on the singer. Overall, Wilsons aim was to bring Black experiences -- not just a singular one -- in America to the stage, with all 10 eventually performed on Broadway.

He wrote vital plays, director Ruben Santiago-Hudson told ET of Wilsons work. Plays that had pulses. They reflected each generation and each time specifically in importance and nature of issues of that era. But things change only so much, the disguise just becomes different. August has a lot of revolution in his plays; its not just survival, theres a lot of revolution.

The last one to make it to Broadway was Wilsons first play, Jitney, which was directed by Santiago-Hudson and starred Andre Holland among an ensemble of Black actors. It opened at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in New York City in 2017, just as Fences was earning accolades, including four Academy Award nominations -- with one being a posthumous nod for Wilson in Best Adapted Screenplay -- and eventually one win, for Best Supporting Actress for Davis performance opposite Washington.

[Audiences] are being exposed to greatness, Davis told ET, when asked about the significance of Wilsons two works being produced for stage and screen at the same time. I think the worst thing is to be that great and to live in any sort of obscurity, because I know I've reaped the benefits of the words and that writing and those characters and those narratives and how much it enriched my life. That's the beauty of it. People are being exposed to the effects of that writing.

She added, Hes no longer unknown. Hes going to be right at the tip of everybody's tongue. It's not going to be August Wilson who?

It's significant because people recognize this extraordinary quality, and it allows the integrity of August Wilson's star to shine so bright right now, Santiago-Hudson also said of the zeitgeist moment, sharing Davis sentiment.

Several years later, Wilson is back in the spotlight as both Ma Raineys Black Bottom and Giving Voice, a documentary produced by Davis and Washington about an annual monologue competition inspired by his work, find their way onto Netflix. The projects also come amid a cultural reckoning in America, as the Black Lives Matter movement not only challenged the systemic and institutionalized racism in all facets of the country but encouraged the importance of Black stories in entertainment.

If director George C. Wolfe had it his way, Ma Raineys Black Bottom would have been released during the height of the movement over the summer. But Washington and others discouraged him from that knee-jerk reaction. Ultimately, the most important thing is that the film is out there, available for audiences to see again and again, unlike the play, which people often only get to see that one time.

People all over the world are going to see it, he tells ET now. I think that feels really kind of thrilling to me simply because all of a sudden, even people who know nothing about him or who have heard of him but havent seen the play will now have his language and his understanding of the world and his characters in their lives.

And what sets Ma Raineys Black Bottom apart from Wilsons other plays, and perhaps what makes it even more resonate as more stories about LGBTQ people of colorare being told, is that it focuses largely on a queer woman. I think thats something that needs to be even celebrated more so, Domingo says, adding that Wilsons plays tend to be very male-centric and normally dont include any gay characters.

But when it comes to Ma, the actor adds, shes a force to be reckoned with, who was an openly gay blues singer who was fighting so many fights in one day. Just to get through the day, she was a woman, she was a Black woman, she was a queer, Black woman in a male-dominated industry.

That diversity within the Black experience is even reflected in Giving Voice, and the new generation of performers who are interpreting and performing Wilsons words in the annual August Wilson Monologue Competition. Every year, thousands of students from across America vie for a chance to perform on Broadway.

And despite Wilsons work being written decades ago, for many of the young competitors, it still relatable to what many are going through today. If this play was written a while ago and this is still happening, we need to do something about it, says Gerardo Navarro, one of the teenage performers in the documentary.

No matter what, with both projects available on the streaming platform, People will now know the majesty of August Wilsons work, Wolfe says.

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Viola Davis, Colman Domingo on the Importance of Telling August Wilson's Stories on Screen (Exclusive) - WUSA9.com

The News Tribune asked local brewers and bakers and others in the biz to talk about their best bites from the past year. Here is what they said.

Lobster roll at Scenic 61 (Christa Lawler / clawler@duluthnews.com)

"My best food was the lobster roll from the airstream trailer at The Scenic Cafe. My best drink was cedar and cider from Vikre and Duluth Cider."

DAVE HOOPS is the veteran brewer behind Hoops Brewing and whose Hoops on Hops column runs in the News Tribune. The New Scenic opened an airstream trailer, Scenic 61, and has been serving customers in the parking lot and at a few pop-up locations.

Laura Kirwin liked New Scenic Cafe's meal kits. (Photo courtesy of Kirwin)

As someone who works in the restaurant business, it was so refreshing to have a nice meal cooked for me from New Scenic Cafe. My husband and I were sick of cooking at home so for our 13-year wedding anniversary, we got a meal kit from New Scenic Cafe. Missing travel and reminiscing about our worldly travels, we ordered the cassoulet (a hearty bean dish with housemade sausages and duck confit) paired with a cherry frangipan tart. I can't tell you how much it lifted our spirits and (temporarily) made us forget about the stressful times we are living in. I'll never forget it.

LAURA KIRWIN goes by the name Bayou Baker when she adds the dessert red velvet cupcakes, pralines, coconut snowballs to the Cajun dinners from Gumbo Boi. New Scenic Cafe, in addition to opening the Scenic 61 food truck, has added meal kits in its Mise en Place Marketplace.

The Buffalo Chikn Tacos at Mama Roots Vegan Food Truck (2020 file / News tribune)

Mama Roots is a huge standout this year. The vegan food truck sold out during their debut, and the peoples taste buds dont lie.

During my visit, the Buffalo Chikn Tacos and Moroccan Carrot Slaw were to die for with organic soy curls that really tasted like chicken! Also, greens, tomato, green onion, buffalo sauce and bus-made ranch (made of aquafaba, lemon, fresh dill and parsley, among other delicious things).

The slaw was sweet, bright, orange in taste and color and well-covered in their ACV-maple syrup-lime aioli. Their food is 100% plant-based, impressive on the taste buds, easy on the wallet and on Mama Earth what more could you ask?

MELINDA LAVINE is a features reporter at the News Tribune and frequently contributor to the Things We Like column. Mama Roots opened as the weather warmed in 2020.

A menu card showing the Real Tacos served by Oasis Del Norte in Duluth. (Clint Austin/caustin@duluthnews.com)

I've loved the innovation of 2020 and the way food became a source of entertainment: The buzz around Doc Witherspoon's Soul Food Kitchen, the radically honest social media presence of Tony O'Neil from JamRock Cultural Restaurant, Gumbo Boi's muffuletta sandwich, served out of a borrowed kitchen, with the coziest homemade bread, Scenic 61 offering New Scenic levels of food with the decidedly concession stand of regular old bag of chips or a bottle of wine. When I interviewed Eduardo Sandoval Luna about taking Oasis Del Norte to a pop-up spot at the mall, he recommended his super torta. I keep going back for it, this handful of taco flavors like beans and cheese and avocado; we add carnitas, but there are other meat options, on a soft tela roll. Every once in a while you come across a glop of mayo and audibly groan with pure food joy. Do not skip the tres leches cake, which is a moist crumble of dessert, and tack on horchata.

CHRISTA LAWLER is a News Tribune features reporter. Oasis Del Norte spent the summer popping up in areas often untouched by food trucks, including an insurance company's parking lot in West Duluth.

Vikre Distillery is offering cocktail kits. (file / News Tribune)

I think the one thing that I enjoyed and was impressed with the most was Vikre and their quick offering of cocktail kits. Each one was hand mixed, creatively packaged and (duh) delicious. It really helped take the edge off those early months of the lock downs and helped keep me feeling classy. And let's not forget to mention the sanitizer program, I didn't drink it, but Vikre deserves a lot of praise for things they did this year. Also, I really enjoy Bent Paddle's Snow Maker brew.

ROBERT LEE went from cooking hobbyist to a full-fledged pop-up shop with Gumbo Boi, which serves cajun dishes on weekends out of the kitchen at Zeitgeist. Vikre Distillery began making hand sanitizer early on in the pandemic, but also has kits filled with ingredients for the home bartender.

The enchiladas at Bucktales are worth the drive, according to Taco Stand writer Jon Nowacki. (Jon Nowacki / jnowacki@duluthnews.com)

Growing up in a small town, I was used to taking road trips as the nearest town was eight miles away, and the nearest restaurant chain, 30 miles away. I did even more driving than normal this spring, with everything shut down, sightseeing out of boredom. I liked hitting Wisconsin Point until they posted a sign saying it was only open to people who lived in Douglas County (not sure how a guy walking outside by himself checking out a lighthouse contributes to the spread of coronavirus, but I digress).So I went the other direction and ended up south of town at a place called Pickled Petes, shortly after Wisconsin opened back up. I was hungry, and the bartender recommended a place just down the road that served great Mexican cuisine.A Mexican restaurant in the middle of nowhere? I had to investigate.Turns out, Bucktales Cantina and Grill was just as advertised.Ive been to Bucktales about a dozen times since, and Ive never been disappointed. Owner and chef Dee Morales never mails it in its always good. He clearly takes pride in his work, whether its traditional Mexican dishes like enchiladas and chimichangas or gyros and Philly sandwiches, and theres always a good Mexican beverage to pair with it.I was there just the other day and while it was listed as an appetizer, the chorizo tacos were a meal in and of themselves, and man, they were good.In this year of COVID-19, and with Minnesota back on lockdown, this holiday season Bucktales has been the gift that keeps on giving. Its definitely worth the drive.

JON NOWACKI is the News Tribune sports reporter who writes the Taco Stand food column. Bucktales is a Mexican restaurant in a bar on South State Rd. in Superior.

The Boat Club's Lake Superior Breakfast comes with whitefish, eggs, arugula, mushrooms and pickled red onion. (Melinda Lavine / mlavine@duluthnews.com)

I was a big fan of The Boat Club. From set up to service to plated meals loved everything about them and went to my own JamRock page to rave about them publicly.

TONY ONEIL took JamRock Cultural Restaurant from a mobile grill to a brick-and-mortar spot at Average Joes and now has plans to move to the former Paks Green Corner, 1901 Tower Ave. The Boat Club, located in the lower level of the Fitgers Complex, specializes in seafood and views.

The Toasty's Burger in Paradise features cream cheese spread, Colby jack cheese, pineapple, cilantro, organic BBQ sauce, lime zest, jalapeos and bacon. (Clint Austin / caustin@duluthnews.com)

We're so blessed with so many amazing local options. But, if I've gotta choose just one I'm going with the Burger in Paradise from Toasty's. It's mortal magic in a bun. Two cheeses, jalapeos, bacon, bbq sauce, lime, two perfectly juicy patties *chef's kiss* superb. I once let someone try a bite of my burger (pre-covid) and cried because they took a bigger bite than I was expecting. Also, I haven't confirmed this, but their fries taste like they blanche them. The BIP and fry combo could get me through, like, five more 2020s. Although Universe if you're reading this pleeeaaassee understand that it's just hyperbole. Less pandemics, more burgers in paradise.

RACHELLE RAHN of Duluth Kombucha recently reopened in a new space, 12 S. 15th Ave. E. Toastys, located in downtown Duluth, is a sandwich shop that offers variations on the classic grilled cheese sandwich in addition to burgers.

There are two things I have eaten the most in 2020.

One would be a cheese burger from Lake Ave. This is definitely my favorite restaurant in Duluth. They always have a creative, well thought out delicious menu but I always come back to this perfect patty. I have to get my burger fix from them a few times a month. Hands down best in the D!

Two would be fettuccine alfredo from Gannuccis Italian Market! Bill puts a lot of love into all his dishes but that one in particular is, in my opinion, the best in town. The noodles are handmade, perfectly cooked, and the sauce is creamy perfection.

JONATHAN REZNICK owns The Rambler food truck and MidCoast Catering and was part of the movement to deliver food to frontline workers during the pandemic. Lake Ave. is based in the Dewitt-Seitz Building and Gannuccis Italian Market is a West Duluth mainstay.

Love Creamery's salted caramel ice cream. (2016 file / News Tribune)

We honestly eat our food all the time, but we also love love love to visit Love Creamery. The completely made-from-scratch taste is never missed and included in every flavor. My wife especially loves the gluten/dairy free options like Smores. My favorite flavor is the Honey Chamomile because it reminds me of home, a flavor I had growing up as a kid.

EDUARDO SANDOVAL LUNA opened a pop-up Oasis Del Norte at the Miller Hill Mall with plans to stay through March. Love Creamery, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, seemed to have a steady stream of masked and distanced customers throughout the pandemic.

Lulu's Pizza Banh Mi-Za features pork or mock duck, a pickle medley, cilantro, banh mi sauce, roasted garlic, olive oil and shredded mozzarella cheese. (Clint Austin / caustin@duluthnews.com)

The affogato at Love Creamery. This isn't news, but does it need to be? It's sooooo good. I like to get mine with the salted caramel ice cream and top it with whipped cream because it reminds me of the ones we had on our honeymoon in Italy!

The banh mi pizza at Lulu's pizza. Lulu's opened right before the pandemic began, which seems like unlucky timing, but maybe it wasn't since their pizza is pretty much the perfect take out food. We have been picking up pizza for dinner almost every Friday since the pandemic began, and the banh mi is my steady favorite.

EMILY VIKRE of Vikre Distillery published Camp Cocktails this past year and the distillery also made a quick move to create hand sanitizer when there was a sanitizer drought and also has created cocktail kits. Love Creamery is a craft ice cream shop that quickly adapted to the pandemic. Lulus Pizza has clever pizza options and is at 420 W. Superior St.

It's been a super odd year for eating out, but there were still some good experiences. I have so many favorite spots like Lake Ave Cafe, Phoholic, OMC / Duluth Grill. It's really hard to pick something. I really miss the Scenic Cafe. The Earthwood Inn in Two Harbors sometimes has fresh herring and fresh lake trout fish cakes. It's bar food connected to a little motel, but if they have fresh fish they do a really great job served with hush puppies and fries. Yikes, it's a greasy dinner, but a little juxtapose to fine dining and super foodie fun that I'm usually after. For a favorite drink option, the new Jade Fountain has some really top-notch cocktails with really interesting ingredients and house made ginger beer and other concoctions.

JASON WUSSOW made a quick shift to add a drive-thru window at Wussows Concert Cafe in West Duluth, in addition to hosting parking lot concerts this past summer. Jade Lounge is a tiki bar located across the street from Wussows and The Earthwood Inn will often update its Facebook page with its fresh fish options.

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Duluth's best bites of 2020 ranged from fresh herring to ice cream - Duluth News Tribune

The Wall Group has produced a digital magazine, out today.

The global agency, which represents the industrys leading fashion and beauty creators, tapped into its in-house talent for the free publication, called Inside/Outside. The project is a reflection of the climate this year with the coronavirus pandemic, featuring home diaries from the likes of stylist Yashua Simmons and makeup artist Bo Champagne, recipes from creator Margaret Zhang and FaceTime shoots with IMG Models.

Stylist Chloe Hartstein used the opportunity to spotlight Black Lives Matter activists Qween Jean and Vidal Guzman.

When The Wall Group first approached me about contributing to their new magazine, it was very clear to me that I wanted to share this platform with people who have inspired me and challenged my thinking in the past few months, and who dont necessarily get a huge platform to amplify their voices, Hartstein said. As hard as 2020 has been, I feel so thankful for the incredible humans Ive met through the [Black Lives Matter] movement, whove shared their stories, and made all of us better people through the process. It felt right to share my new family with my Wall Group family.

Inside/Outside, available at insideoutside.thewallgroup.com, was done remotely by The Wall Groups digital team, led by creative director Erin Dennison. The work was a collaborative effort with nothing commissioned, said the agency. They expect to produce more issues.

As we reflected on the extraordinary events of 2020 and their profound impact on our lives, we felt compelled to capture and memorialize the diverse perspectives and experiences that have shaped our understanding of this watershed moment, founder and chief executive officer Brooke Wall told WWD in a statement.

Wall created the agency in 2000. In 2015, it was acquired by Endeavor, formerly WME-IMG.

I am proud of our artists and our team, who have come together to create a body of work that beautifully encapsulates the myriad emotions of this year, showcasing not only their creativity but their support of one another through this challenging time, she continued. Our hope is that Inside/Outside will not only capture the 2020 zeitgeist, but remind our fashion community that we can and will get through this together.

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The Wall Group Launches Digital Magazine, Showcasing BLM and Creatives at Home - WWD

In her recent paintings exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, on view through 23 December 2020, the artist has continued to develop what she refers to as insistent gestures and neologisms. They are marks that have progressed over time, becoming larger in size, decisive in stroke, and referential to forms before them. This newly invented language emerges from her desire to further develop the space she creates, where she reimagines the potential of the liminal expanse born in the in-between or transitional place.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

Always circling back to biblical references, Mehretu's exhibition is enveloped in its drama. Like the clouds over The Raft of the Medusa (18181819) by Thodore Gricault, the exhibition recalls the Book of Revelation and the narrative of the Seven Seals of God that eventually lead to the beginning of the apocalypse.

It is in that moment before the apocalypse, and in that impossible frame of theological time, that Mehretu finds the space for another possibility. In these paintings Mehretu works dynamically, starting her process with a news image, which she first digitally alters and blurs. She distils the essence of that image, its spirit and substance, and builds layers of a gradient and saturated palette consumed by blacks and resonating colours, airbrushed and sanded impressions of varying opacity and pointed deconstruction.

Julie Mehretu, Maahes (Mihos) torch (20182019). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

The series of seven paintings, 'about the space of half an hour (R. 8:1)' (20182020) depict this hovering between realms. There is a sense of anticipation among streamers of saturated colour, movement, and form, their gestures evoking a post-event in an uncanny space. They are suspended among particles of airbrush, indicating that the dust hasn't settled yet.

Mehretu's paintings collapse space and time, breaking linear progressions of human histories and narratives through repurposing and transformation.

In the series of aquatint photogravures, 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' (2020), Mehretu references both Joan Didion's collection of essays and W.B Yeats' poem, 'The Second Coming'. Her paintings in this series begin with blurred images of worldwide protests and movements transformed into abstractions of light, shadow, and colour on the large surfaces inhabited by her gestural marks.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

The vertigo-induced image both manifests and destabilises the catastrophic logic of those contemporary moments that are alluded to in the works' titles. This is a unique quality in the paintings, which maintain their indeterminacy as delineated in the spaces of near illumination and penumbras manifested by the hovering patterns, computer glitches, painterly streaks, and forms and glimmers of light that push through the shadows. Mehretu's paintings collapse space and time, breaking linear progressions of human histories and narratives through repurposing and transformation. The paintings consequently evoke the possibilities to be discovered within the blur, altering the images into disembodied experience.

'There's an access to this other condition that is insistent,' she explains to me in our conversation. Black lines and shapes hover over masses of shadow and light in another series of seven paintings also in the exhibition. In Loop (B. Lozano, Bolsonaro eve) (20192020), the title suggests a realm between contemporary Brazilian political corruption and a dedication to novelist Brenda Lozano whose love story ruminates on marking and erasure.

Julie Mehretu, Loop (B. Lozano, Bolsonaro eve) (20192020). Ink and acrylic on canvas 243.8 x 304.8 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

Here, Mehretu looks to her surroundings. Synthesising her immediate environment and the social and political zeitgeist raging in the United States and the world, she reciprocates with abstraction that resists a single idea, and instead, draws a perspective where a once fortified patriarchal world shows its cracks.

Mehretu's paintings are immersive in this way. Works like Rise (Charlottesville) (20182019) allow us to step into these histories of brutal colonialism, orthodox doctrines, and natural exploitation, their demise revealed in a collective punishment of flames devouring parched forests, and revolts and protests fuelled by racial oppression and killings.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

The paintings on view demonstrate Mehretu's tremendous creative output during this year of global pandemic. She began some of the painting at the early stages of the pandemic reality in New York, and continued throughout the curfews and lockdowns.

Within this space of anticipation, she constructed a visual language in abstraction, which leaves an afterimage imprinted in the mind's eye, like the fleeting flash-blindness of dark spots that appear after a bright flash of light. This corporeal and time-based experience of Mehretu's paintings feels like an emergence in that instance of anticipation as your vision begins to return, and the swirly lines and dots dissolve. It is the calm before the storm, as the image comes back into focus.

Julie Mehretu, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Second Seal (R 6:3) (2020). Photogravure, aquatint. 170 x 208 cm. Edition of 18. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist, BORCH Gallery & Editions and Marian Goodman Gallery.

JMOpacity and abstraction are at the core of my practice and have been since graduate school. One should never feel the need to translate, or explain who and how one is for anyone else. This has never been asked of white male artists in terms of their identity. Black artists are too often expected to explain who they are in their work, which is based on racist ideas of authenticity.

Radical liberatory practices come from breaking away from the constraints of those ideas of authenticity, language, identity, culture, or any form of determinism. So much of the Black Radical tradition has been based in abstraction, precisely for this reason.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

In my work, the language of abstraction has evolved. Painting evolves slowly. But through years of working and mark-making, how I think about space, surface, the marks, and what can happen in a painting has transformed.

I think it really started with the 'Mogamma' paintings (2012)the scale of them and what takes place in terms of how one optically experiences the paintings. They take timea different kind of space opens up in them. It is a visceral experience, not just of space, but maybe also in relation to the memory of space and how one experiences that, while the marks become something else in their interaction with the architecture.

When I started to understand this whole time-based physical experience in the paintings, the architectural drawing became redundant to me. It was not necessary as a signifier anymore. At that point, I became interested in the blur.

Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 457.2 x 365.76 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

The blur grew out of projecting a photograph that had an architectural image in it. I was projecting a photograph of a bombed-out street that was out of focus on the projector, and it felt more haunting than tracing the ruins.

Everything that the blurred photo contained felt more palpable. One could not only feel the history of it, but the possible future of that ruin as wellall from this weird blurred photograph. It became more potent, in a way, so I took that as a starting point. I experimented in Photoshop using spray paint and airbrush, trying to create this ephemeral, blurry, hazy spacethe blur became the uncertainty of the image.

We live in a super mediated environment, especially considering social media, and every person's reality is differently informed by that. It's like a house of mirrors where we can't locate ourselves, and I don't think anyone really understands our sense of space, time, place, or history within it.

Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 457.2 x 365.76 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

The whole idea of 20th-century progress and ideas of futurity and modernity have been shattered, in a way. All of this is what is informing how I am trying to think about space.

Paul Pfeiffer and Lawrence Chua and I have a collaborative, collective project called Denniston Hill, which has been an artist residency but is also a collaborative creative space to mine and invent forms of liberatory practices and pedagogies.

The whole idea of 20th-century progress and ideas of futurity and modernity have been shattered, in a way. All of this is what is informing how I am trying to think about space.

For the past few years and the foreseeable future, the theme of our interrogation and projects revolve around the idea of exodus and aesthetics of uncertainty. Not the promised land, but rather of the post-emancipatory moment of those 40 years at a complete and utter loss in the desert: the cognitive confusion of that moment and that uncertaintythe haze and blur of the murmurings.

Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 457.2 x 365.76 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

That is the conceptual space that I have also been exploring in my paintings. These blurred photos are of a moment that we collectively experience. You don't need to know which California fire Hineni (E. 3:4) (2018) isit could be Beirut, Brazil, or Myanmar.

My interest is more in the visceral, collective source of that experience. For me, it becomes this activated, fertile space I can work in and respond to. I think the opacity of abstraction, that space to play with language, is where one can invent other images or possibilities. It's not about delineating or defining some concrete political perspective, or some directive on how to understand things, or even a historical narrative. It's about the collision of all those thingsthe uncertainty and murmurings of all that.

For a lot of people, this way of working can be problematic, especially so for Black artists or artists of colour, who are expected to explain who they are and to tell the world their perspectives. It goes back to the idea of the right to abstractionthe right to opacity.

Julie Mehretu, Hineni (E. 3:4) (2018). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 304.8 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMYes. In the Book of Revelations, it's the moment after the four horsemen of the apocalypse are released; after the seventh seal is opened and 'there would be silence in heaven for about the space of half an hour.' It is the moment that's considered the threshold, the calm before the storm, or the space before the apocalypse; before the second coming.

During this whole pandemic, it felt like time was suspended. Many failures of our social systems have been exposed by the pandemic. But, at the same time, especially the first few months, it was this massive pause.

I was working upstate on these paintings, reading Moby-Dick and listening to it when I had insomnia. This story is about foreboding and mayhem, as well as the calm before the storm. We have been completely captured in this suspended, vertiginous, foreboding moment, with our own Captain Ahab catapulting us further into clear disaster. The show also opened the day before the election, so that was another threshold in my conscious.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

JMYes, I was more interested in that blur and that hazeto find the emergent light and forms within, as well as the absence and emergence of figures and what happens to them within these haunted spaces of imprisonment.

There is a charged DNA in the blur, for me; it affects my interaction with the painting, and it enables me to play with the spectre inside the image.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

JMFred Moten discusses the continual release of the fugitive and the possibility that emerges therehow Black joy can be advanced through negotiating against the constant effort to negate and extinguish that.

There are incredible inventions across American culture that are rooted in the effort to find possibility and joy, in the context of Black creativity and experimentation, despite all efforts against this and through pain.

Julie Mehretu, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Third Seal (R 6:5) (2020). Photogravure and aquatint. 169.9 x 208 cm. Edition of 18. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist, BORCH Gallery & Editions and Marian Goodman Gallery.

So even though many of the previous 20th-century concepts of futurity feel shattered and impossible as tropes, there's still a determined persistence on something else that is possible. That is core to my investigation in painting. There is intentionality and intensity in this pleasure and excitementthe fervent effort to make and createand I think part of that comes from this place.

I'm reading this book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, where she follows the ecology, economy, and history of the matsutake mushrooma rare delicacy in Japan. Basically, it's this mushroom that thrives in damaged landscapes. She argues that by tracking the mushroom, the people who have travelled the world to pick itmostly refugees from Southeast Asiapresent a case for creative, imaginative ways to reinvent ourselves in the midst of precarity.

Julie Mehretu, A Mercy (after T. Morrison) (20192020). Julie Mehretu. Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 304.8 cm. Courtesy the artist.

To me that is super profound when considering the creative work and creative thinking required of this time. It is our role to mine those possibilities, and to figure out how to continue to exist, insist, and to persist. It's not pessimistic.

I think that the elements of wanting to create, think through mediated images and painting, participate in the history of painting, learn how to make another picture and what that time-based experience is like, and to insist on a visceral, transformative experience that can happen in front of a work, can allow one to participate in those imaginative possibilities.

Julie Mehretu, Orient (after D. Cherry, post Irma and summer) (20172020). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 274.3 x 304.8 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMYes, I was writing a piece on John Coltrane recently, and I was thinking about how, 50 years ago, coming out of Jim Crow and the denial of any type of humanity, there was still a revered creative force. His work, I think, was to mine and invent another space where he could be free, through concepts of universality and various forms of religion and spirituality.

So how do you do that when you don't have a language for that? You can't use the language of the oppressor in the same way. But it's not just the language of the oppressorit's the way you understand the world.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

I think that's where the neologism comes inwhere we invent new words. In music, there's the invention of sound and the constant effort to mine structure and sound. There's the effort in trying to create some kind of texture, space, and experience that goes beyond what can be defined or described or articulated with the language of pain, because experience is visceral and known.

I think the opacity of abstraction, that space to play with language, is where one can invent other images or possibilities.

I'm not trying to speak opaquely, it's just all of this stuff is complicated, contradictory, undefined, and intangible. Is intuition a sense that is mined from the ontological congregation of resistance, an ontological congregation of ancestry; of a collective? How does one have understanding or access to different points of history, of time and of space in their knowing?

Marilynne Robinson said these beautiful words about writing fiction: 'It sounds as if it's some jag of mysticism or something but in fact it's true and I think it's important to me for people to realize that there are much larger, more complex, more consequential entities than most culture allows them to believe . . . when I'm writing fiction the hope is that I will have found my way to something that speaks for itself that is not interpreted but is adequate to interpretation when it comes.'

Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour (R. 8:1) 1 (20192020). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMAbsolutely, especially in the architectural drawingsthe marks were always trying to be like clogs in the machine. They were trying to devour that system, if you willwork against it, devour it, participate in it, but ultimately, there's this kind of emergent entropy.

I think you see that energy in the paintings in the gallery. There's a kind of fury coming out of what the marks and blurs participate in creating, but there's also this dynamic happening with all of the other elements in colour. I feel like they participate in the construction of a systemic thing, but they also fall apart in that.

Julie Mehretu, Rise (Charlottesville) (20182019). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

It reminds me of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, who wrote, 'I find myself surrounded by patchiness, that is, a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs . . . only an appreciation of the current precarity as an earth-wide condition allows us to notice thisthe situation of our world.'

I think all of that is a part of the disruption and the kind of breaking of a particular linear narrative. One of the paintings is titled Loop, after Brenda Lozano's book, where the protagonist goes through these cycles that weave from ancient mythology to today, through these repetitive, sometimes creepy patterns. That's the kind of magnitude of time that we connect with that's also broken and disrupted, so I think there's a participation in that, not only in a disruptive way, but also in a generative way.

Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour (R. 8:1) 3 (20192020). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMOf course, part of the intention with the work is to participate in this grand history of painting, which has been dominated by the white male painters for the most part. And institutionally and structurally, whether it's colonialism or patriarchy, or heteronormativity, it all contributes to the history of abstraction.

Julie Mehretu, Being Higher I (2013). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 213.36 x 152.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and White Cube. Julie Mehretu. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

What I'm trying to do with the making of these pictures is to try to resist, invent, and push against all of that. So, part of it is the scale of the work, and part of it is the desire to work in this language that has been denied to many people, though numerous artists have been working this way for decades. How does one articulate fragmentary breakdown, of a decentred way of looking? A multi-perspectival way of approaching paintings and an openness to their reading? It is all a part of the refusal of autocratic and patriarchal systems.

I think about those things because they are core to not just the way that I make, but also the way that I amthe way I live and participate in the world. This also goes back to what you asked earlier about opacity alongside negation in abstraction.

Exhibition view: Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2 November23 December 2020). Julie Mehretu. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.

JMI think part of the effort in trying to find a space for oneself is to constantly be inventing, finding, and mining your own spaceinsisting that you have that rightas we have to do as marginalised people.

The constant effort of trying to find a space for oneself is to work against and participate in that language: to use that language, to participate in that language, to shift it and morph it, and to create something else out of that, but also to insist on a state of possibility. I keep using that word 'possibility,' without it being too directed.

Julie Mehretu, about the space of half an hour (R. 8:1) 4 (20192020). Ink and acrylic on canvas. 243.8 x 182.9 cm. Julie Mehretu. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.

JMIt is the most potent thing I feel I can do. Morton Subotnick said, in a conversation with Paul Holdengraber, 'The meaning of life, for me, and it never changed, is you find out who you are. Your duty is to find out who you are, what you are, and do the very best you can with that, and share what you do with other people. That's what I've done my whole life.'

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Julie Mehretu on the Right to Abstraction - Ocula Magazine

DECEMBER 14, 2020

COFFEE-TABLE BOOKS about swimming pools are a surprisingly well-established genre. Lavish, glossy, and tempting, theyre almost like pop-up books their images practically lunge at the reader, a medley of splashes and bodies. They dont look particularly serious and seem to make the perfect winter gift, if you can withstand the tease of aquatic pleasure while its freezing, raining, or snowing outside.

The latest entry in this increasingly crowded field is Lou Stoppards Pools from the house of lavish itself, Rizzoli. Like the editor of most such books, Stoppard is light of touch and low of word count, including just a few choice paragraphs to accompany photographs that are intended to speak for themselves. But what are they saying? To distinguish this book from several similar ones, Rizzoli has wrapped the cover in a latex-like transparent blue sleeve. This slightly kinky touch makes the book appear to be submerged in water, beckoning the reader to dive in. Several of the pictures Stoppard includes have been reproduced before in recent books like Hatje Cantzs stunning album of classic 20th-century images, The Swimming Pool in Photography (2018). Stoppard, however, juxtaposes canonical shots with pool photography from the present, allowing the reader to see how the cultural imagination of the swimming pool has evolved.

These utilitarian exercise machines, these mere accessories to boutique vacations, possess a very varied cultural backstory. Enjoy your workout! my friendly neighborhood pool attendant yells at me just before I enter the water. I always bristle at this aggressively cheerful exhortation, because swimming is much more than exercise. Its a form of ritual that involves a highly deliberate process of transformation: the careful, even fetishistic shedding of a quotidian skin. One doesnt have to accept the Freudian notion that swimming enacts a return to the womb and some form of prelapsarian amniotic nirvana to appreciate that bathing originated in the ancient world as a component of religious ritual, and that the act has by no means entirely lost the aura of a baptismal rite. The Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro in Sindh, Pakistan, which dates as far back as the third millennium BCE, appears to have encouraged bathing for just this sort of reason, and remains an archaeological site of considerable historical value. The ancient Greeks and Romans constructed pools for athletic purposes, it is true, but employed them for many other purposes besides, including ritualized social bathing and the keeping of fish, resulting in the term piscine.

Our modern image of the swimming pool as exercise machine and Olympic arena thus possesses a richly complicating global history. In the early modern era, Europeans shunned bathing as an activity for savages Africans and Asians were brilliant divers whose skills they could barely comprehend, let alone emulate. When Westerners finally embraced swimming again as a mass pursuit by the turn of the 20th century, it was with a dramatic sense of rediscovery and rapture. The avatar of the Surrealist movement Andr Breton rhapsodized about what he called the voluptuousness of swimming, declaring himself born under the sign of Pisces. Swimming not only changed ones body, he insisted, but transformed ones mind, freeing it from the shackles of rationalistic thought to a more authentic dimension of imaginative consciousness.

Lou Stoppards juxtapositions of classic and contemporary photos suggest how the swimming pools cultural meaning has shifted during the century since Breton. Consider, for instance, the following carefully curated double-page spread. On one side, the reader is greeted by Jacques-Henri Lartigues adoring portrait of Marie Helvin at the French Rivieras Eden Roc Hotel pool in 1977. On the one hand, its just another glamour shot: big-name photographer, top model, high-end digs. But the picture is exquisitely realized, a vision of ecstasy. Helvins head thrown back, eyes closed, her expression is beatific. Her jet-black locks dance mesmerizingly in the water around her. The portrait dazzlingly records the play of light on her chest, tracing wild light-lines across her skin, which looks as though it is swathed in sunlit Jell-O. In Helvins profoundly private sense of repose and pleasure, Lartigue captures the paradox of erotic desire as innocent bliss.

Opposite this blast from the 1970s, Stoppard reproduces two bright and striking images by Karine Laval shot in 2010. Laval calls these images Poolscapes. Four-plus decades on from Helvins hedonistic headshot at Eden Roc, Lavals pictures offer few anatomical, social, or geographical coordinates. No details of place or person are deemed worthy of inclusion even in the titles of these shots. Lavals are not pictures of a swimming pool as such, more an exercise in the production of disorientating chromatic-aquatic effects. A submerged human figure, clad in red, can be seen in some sort of agitated pose, like a cubist minotaur strutting against the currents. The viewers gaze is dashed by shards of light and color that come flying out of the image. Brittle and crystalline, they cut up the humanoid form: all that is soft shatters into lines. If this is the picture of a swimming pool, youd never know it, since Laval has abstracted it into a set of tones, lines, and ripples. We have left Bretons voluptuousness of swimming and Helvins fleshy ecstasies far behind. The question is how and why?

Its crucial here to go back to the early part of the 20th century, when Breton and many others dreamt of swimming as a revelatory and paradisiacal form of experience, to understand how the archetypal pool photo was invented. A better description than ecstasy for Helvins portrait is reverie: closing ones eyes while in the water, escaping into a personal and private realm not merely of physical pleasure but intimate emotional and psychological experience, enabled by the act of immersion. This is the classic photographic conceit of the swimming pool as an entity that transports its subject to a dream-like world beyond the quotidian and beyond the limitations of gravity. Invented in the 1920s and 30s during the zeitgeist of Surrealism and psychoanalysis, this kind of photo features the swimming pool not as an arena of competition or consumerism, but as the trigger of subconscious desires for personal transformation.

There are many versions of this archetype, and Stoppard lovingly reproduces several of the best. Perhaps the first great psychological pool picture is George Hoyningen-Huenes masterpiece from 1930 featuring two bathers sitting together on a diving board. Their backs are turned to us and we cannot see their faces. They are modeling elegant designer beachwear, but this mundane act of salesmanship is completely transcended by the existential quality of their pose. They look away to the horizon, following the trajectory of the diving board, perhaps with excitement, perhaps trepidation. We cannot know. But we have been fooled. The viewers mind has responded to the diving board and imagined the presence of water below it. There was no pool: Hoyningen-Huene took the picture on a rooftop high above the Champs Elyses in Paris.

The conceit of the swimming pool as a portal to other mental, historical, and even mythological dimensions is also superbly suggested by Louise Dahl-Wolfe in Night Bathing, shot in 1939. A woman in a delicately striped one-piece bathing suit stands at the edge of a pool by night, mirrored in her pose by a statue of Aphrodite, goddess of love. Both figures look shyly away from the camera, as the darkness presses in. This pool is a scene of metamorphosis; indeed, it is reminiscent of the tales of Ovids Metamorphoses, such as Narcissus falling in loving with his own reflection. The juxtaposition of the two female figures implies the pools hidden power to transform the living woman into a goddess.

Pools, bathing, swimming, swimwear: in the post-Freudian imagination, the superficial accessories of luxurious living become tools of psychological emancipation and emotional self-expression. Yet they also became instruments of fascist conformism, racialist theorizing, and eugenic ideology. Between Hoyningen-Huenes divers and Wolfes Aphrodite, Leni Riefenstahl filmed Olympia, her unsettlingly brilliant documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Riefenstahls Aryanist dogmas led her to combine bravura images of swimmers and divers competing in front of cheering stadiums in Nazi Germany with a fantastical sequence featuring Greek statues coming to life as German athletes. The modernist swimming pools dream of transformation was as politically dangerous as it was personally alluring.

The psychological pool photo enjoyed a long afterlife, flourishing well into the 1970s. Martine Francks image of a boy in a hammock gazing at sunbathers round the curves of Alain Capeilleress pool near Marseilles suggests those curves as the very contours of his mind. Horst P. Horst who posed as one of Hoyningen-Huenes divers in 1930 shot Janice Dickinson cocking her head to one side, eyes closed, in that eternal yet fleeting instant before exiting a sun-drenched pool. Its 1979, and like Helvin, Dickinson is a nude supermodel. But Horsts portrait is still an image of innocence and experience still the picture of swimming as flight to a private mental paradise.

Such images of bathing as reverie coexisted, however, with two main rivals in the late 20th century: social shots of public pools as riotous lower-class playgrounds; and luxury shots of private pools as pure consumer glamour. Exceptionally, all three visions might converge in the same image, like Helmut Newtons virtuosically overloaded panorama of Pariss Piscine Deligny in 1978. Newton fused sexuality, surrealism, and glamour with dark humor. Worlds collide with magnificently absurd results. In the foreground, two models in black evening gowns pose with incongruous campy melodrama, as male bathers stripped down to their briefs look on with a mix of desire and exasperation under a hot sun. Yet the humorous center of the photograph is a wonderfully oblivious topless female bather who entirely ignores the absurdity around her, hunched with Rodin-like concentration over the book she is reading. Newtons photo captures the invasion of the swimming pool as a public institution and its denaturing by money, glamour, and fantasy, presaging the shift in pool photos since the 1980s from a public resource for ordinary people to a moneyed private oasis. Newton played a leading role in this transformation, especially in all the celebrity shoots he did in the 80s; perhaps the Deligny panorama is a confessional premonition, a mea culpa before the fact. Anyone who has floated idly in the Standard Hotels enticing rooftop pool in downtown Los Angeles, to name just one of todays most photogenic boutique destinations, might well conclude that glamour won, the spirit of the bains publics is dead, and Newton helped kill it.

It would likewise be tempting to read pictures of bathers taken in momentous political years, like Olaf Martenss portraits of swimmers in the German Democratic Republic in 1989 (which Stoppard also includes), in a similar light. 1989, after all, is famously taken to mark the end of the Cold War, the end of history, the end of the public, and the dominance of capital. In the vanished world of the GDR, now a distant mirage of social unity and fodder for Ostalgie, a regimented body is about to spring into a pool like a wind-up toy programmed to win an Olympic medal for the communist bloc. Meanwhile, Martenss portraits of the naked yet submerged Simone evince the distinctive German Freikrperkultur (free body culture) that encouraged public nudism as a form of salubrious self-expression in the absence of political or economic freedoms.

If 1989 does mark the caesura between 20th and 21st centuries, what does recent photography reveal about the cultural meaning of the swimming pool of the present? One answer lies in the utterly banal celebrity culture that Newtons Piscine Deligny image foreshadowed. We have ended up with images like supermodel Gisele Bndchen striding past a pool, staring straight to camera, being ogled by some starry-eyed dude in sunglasses. And with shots of former James Bond star Pierce Brosnans teenage sons Dylan and Paris lounging in jeans, backs turned to their Bel Air pool, occupied instead by two inflatable swans. The pool as designer accessory is wholly evacuated, a reference point you dont even have to look at. Its just a checklist luxury. In the absence of any social realism or public context, glamour, wealth, and privilege have bored themselves, and the viewer, to death, making the pool itself invisible.

A second answer is to be found in Stoppards canny juxtapositions. Opposite Janice Dickinsons glamour shot, for example, Stoppard places a double-portrait taken from 2018 by the fashion photographer Joyce Sze Ng. This picture features two women of color, elaborately clothed in gowns, staring from distance straight at the camera. They stand on the other side of a motionless, mirror-like pool that reflects their dignified yet expressionless faces. The photograph is neither one of pleasure nor psychological depth; indeed, it seems to disavow any invitation to depth. The picture is a hybrid: a fashion photographer evidently making a political statement, but what is the statement? Sze Ngs subjects appear to demand that the viewer acknowledge their presence but without any promise of revelation or intimacy, since they parry the viewers gaze. The inward gaze of reverie has turned outward to repel the viewer. Sze Ng seems to want to make a point about identity but, perhaps wanting to disavow the history of female nudity in pool art, feels it necessary to disavow the pool itself, converting it instead into a conceptual abstraction.

Sze Ngs double-portrait has a self-consciously pristine quality that is even more evident in the photography of Slve Sundsb, although Sundsbs pristineness is of a different character. It is technological, and showcases a third trend in recent pool imagery: the abstraction of pools and bodies into technical virtuosity. Sundsb does still take photos of people in water. One portrait of a young woman in a dark asymmetrical bathing suit shows her gazing wide-eyed under sanitized steel-blue water, like a doll in suspended animation or an amniotic spa. She enjoys no state of reverie, however; her open eyes appear lifeless. But the viewer is distracted by Sundsbs bubbles, which the speed of his camera recasts as beads of blown glass. Sundsb loves his bubbles; other shots engulf human forms in vast bubble clouds that fan out like Rorschach patterns. Sundsb says he strives for purity in such images, but the result is really pure mechanism: one cant help look at these pictures without thinking of the lens rather than the artist. What is absent from this kind of work is not merely the psychological charisma of classic pool photography, but the social reality of the swimming pool and its storied cultural identity. Instead of accumulating and drawing on this history, it is all but erased.

Why has pool art taken these turns? Several predictable answers naturally suggest themselves. We now possess more powerful cameras than ever before, with much faster lenses, and greater capacity for manipulating images. At the same time, our culture has tired of meaning and come to mistrust the promise of depth. We have rejected not only Freud but, seemingly, the whole nave project of self-discovery, settling instead for anti-depressants, cheaper consumer goods, harder bodies, and endless Instagram posts. Most importantly of all, we have retreated from public life to private islands. If photography provides any sort of guide to our collective imagination and it may not we no longer marvel at the grand architectural designs of public baths but dream of the hotel spa and the exclusive infinity pool. Twentieth-century photographers loved social realism and the hedonistic playfulness of the madding crowd; their 21st-century heirs are private clinicians who shun the mixing of different social classes in public waters.

But lets go easy on the jeremiad. Stoppards selections undeniably show that the dream of the swimming pool in all its different forms is far from over. There are a number of contemporary photographers who resist the current vogue for the clinical and the impersonal, the luxurious and the technical. For these artists, the pool is not an abstraction but an enduringly meaningful dream-machine that continues to inspire compelling, humorous, and imaginative visions.

Stoppard includes many extraordinary images of public pools as social panoramas that continue to be shot around the world, showcasing multitudes of bathers clambering en masse for the physical pleasure and psychic relief of water from the multiracial swimmers of the French banlieues to the vast crowds happily hugging the shores of indoor beaches complete with artificial wave machines in Japan. The reverie shot is not dead either, but lives on, poignantly renewed in Diana Markosians portraits of Afghani refugees floating in pools in Germany. They lie on their backs, gazing heavenward, dreaming of a better life. Even America boasts trusty throwbacks to bygone pool pleasures. Alice Hawkins is an expert in the popular sublime: she knows how to take sparkling shots evoking dreams of glamour that are far from faded for her subjects. These include gangs of girls lounging on dusty pool decks, wedding parties thrilling to kitsch joys of liquor and love, and close-ups of a cheeky blondes Lucky Bum, poolside in Vegas. Hawkinss bathers have no doubt that the swimming pool can still sprinkle magic dust on ordinary life.

Finally, Stoppard includes one of the most striking pool photos of recent years, and quite possibly of all time a remarkable untitled image made by the British photographer Polly Brown, taken in France in 2015. Like much recent pool art, the picture admittedly has a clinical quality, lacks an explicit psychological appeal, and offers no portrait of society. Unlike almost all recent work, however, it possesses a genuinely exhilarating grandeur of conception. Browns camera tracks a lone female swimmer in mid-stroke from high above a large multi-laned pool. All geared up, she wears a dark blue one-piece, cap, goggles, and even fins. The aerial distance between camera and subject makes the picture impersonal. Bright but sunless, its steely blue colors cool the viewers eyes. We are too far to sense the swimmers emotions.

There is, however, no flight to abstraction here: this is a swimmer in a pool. Yet we cannot see the pools edges. This is crucial. We cannot see where the pool begins or ends, that it begins or ends. Through her cropping, Brown has given us a subtly yet profoundly suggestive portrait of the pool as an infinite expanse, and of the swim as a limitless odyssey. The notion is reinforced by two telling details. Painted dots mark distance in each lane like repeating metronomic beats; and the swimmer swims through an opening or gate, the width of a single lane, leading her from one section of the pool to another. She is going somewhere. This is not the 20th-century dream of the inner life; indeed, in the pandemic year of 2020, it could be read merely as an image of persistence or survival in an evacuated world. But it is undoubtedly the image of an existential quest. The majesty of Browns photograph lies in its liberation of the viewers mind from the narrowness of much recent pool art, returning the swimming pool at last to the free rein of the imagination.

James Delbourgo is professor of history at Rutgers University, where he teaches the history of science, collecting and museums, and the history of the Atlantic World. His most recent book is Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (Harvard University Press, 2017).

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The Dream of the Swimming Pool - Los Angeles Review of Books - lareviewofbooks

Do you remember the old Firesign Theatre? On their records (do you remember records?), an absurd scene would dissolve into another absurd scene, until you dissolved in laughter.

To put a period on our annus horribilis, Ike Holters I Hate It Here uses the Firesign Theatre motif. Absurd scenes dissolve into other absurd scenes. But what you dissolve inisnt laughter.

Like Firesign Theatre, this production uses uniformly fine acting and excellent, integrated sound design (Mikhail Fiksel) to turn the soundscape into a dreamscape. Occasionally the tension breaks out into a musical number, just like it does on the Firesign Theatre albums (they are all in exceptional voice in I Hate it Here). But there the resemblance ends.

Another title for Holters work, which is now available for free in audio form on Studio Theatres website, might be I Hate You Here, because its business, like the years, is to strip away our pretensions to reasonableness and good will to reveal the loneliness, fear, and hatred that lies beneath.

Thus, for example, a mother of the bride, a White woman (Jennifer Mendenhall) has a conversation with an African-American guest (Jaysen Wright) which begins with her strategy to be free of responsibilities by her mid-forties but turns into an abstract discussion about the beating of a Black man by police and then turns into a harrowing tale of personal responsibility.

Thus, for example, a schoolteachers (Sydney Charles) monologue about the familiar afflictions of her profession parent-teacher conferences, parents who abdicate responsibility for their childs learning suddenly warps into an account of a profoundly racist act, and of her supervisors decision to accommodate those involved rather than right the wrong. The teacher complains that her supervisor did not hear her, but we know that he did. He just didnt care.

Thus, for example, a woman marks the beginning of the reign of King Covid by noting the death of her dog and then spins a narrative about a world gone completely out of control. (Because the character was never identified by name in this audio piece and is not otherwise identified in the program, I cant name the actor).

In the most compelling piece, Frank (Gabriel Ruiz) and Wash (Tony Santiago) have won a singular victory in their war against the system: the city has installed a stop sign on the corner of their street. Tanya (Charles), a second-generation activist and an old friend of Wash, scoffs at their accomplishments. Is this what they struggled to achieve? Shes meeting the Mayor next week but to what purpose? And so Wash and Tanya go at it, with bad intent: is it better to shoot for the Moon, and achieve nothing? Or to aim lower, and achieve a stop sign?

In this twenty-minute episode, Holter has identified the dilemma of the present movement. The objective is not to change laws, its to change hearts and minds. Its easy to change laws. All it takes is a little marching, some beatings, being torn apart by dogs, going to jail, having a national leader who can play Congress like a bass fiddle, and having your own leader assassinated. But its harder to change hearts and minds. We humans are hard-wired to see the world as sum-zero, and to believe that the only way to be safe is to subdue or kill everyone else. So if the mission is to bring us to the civility and good will we pretend to have, its not the heart and mind that needs to be convinced. Its the amygdala.

Besides, thanks to covid, a lot of folks have lost their minds. And their hearts.

The works subtitle is Stories from the End of the Old World. This implies that there will be a new world. Good luck with that.

Ive made I Hate It Here sound pretty grim. It is. But if this year has made you feel anger, despair, sadness, frustration, hate and depression, its satisfying to know that youre not alone.

It is a clich to say that a work of art captures the zeitgeist of the age. But I Hate it Here does, and thats that.

I Hate It Here: Stories from the End of the Old World1 hour, 22 minutesStreams for free thru March 11, 2021

I Hate It Here: Stories from the End of the Old World, written and directed by Ike Holter, with Sivan Battat as Assistant Director . Featuring Sydney Charles, Behzad Dabu, Kirsten Fitzgerald, Jennifer Mendenhall, Gabriel Ruiz, Tony Santiago, and Jaysen Wright . Sound design by Mikhail Fiksel . Noel Nichols is the audio engineer and dialogue editor . Adrien-Alice Hansel is the dramaturg . Luisa Snchez Coln is the stage manager . Produced by Studio Theatre . Reviewed by Tim Treanor.

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Review: I Hate It Here: Stories from the End of the Old World - DC Theatre Scene

The New Yorker has released a preview of the magazines second-to-last cover of 2020. The cover features an original digital painting by David Hockney, titled Hearth. It depicts a fireplace and is decidedly juvenile in execution. The brushwork appears childish and has sparked a Twitter backlash and outcry.

This is very funny. Hockney is perfectly capable of using digital brushes properly, can only assume he hates someone in the TNY art dept, Jo Livingstone of the New Republic noted in now-deleted tweets, Either that or somebody at TNY doesnt care enough to protect his legacy. Livingstone pointed to a number of Hockneys recently exhibited digital paintings as evidence of his mastery, supporting the supposition that the New Yorker cover might be, in some way, a troll.

Along with the cover in question is a brief synopsis and Q&A with Hockney conducted by Franoise Mouly, the New Yorkers art director. In it we learn that Hockney, after doing 220 digital paintings in 2020, will be returning to oils for a large mural in 2021. While not a sweeping or in-depth discussion of his work, the interview touches on his now decade-long fascination with the iPad as an artistic device and his taking inspiration from tapestries. The piece also features a time-lapse of the digital painting being created.

If anything, the interview raises more questions than it answers. Why, if Hockney went to such great pains over the course of the year to produce this great and specific quantity of work, did Mouly not choose to elevate one of better quality? For these short, dark days, she writes, David Hockney offers the traditional comfort of a hearth.

Hockney is 83 years old and considered among the greatest living British artists for his contributions to the pop art movement in the 1960s. Over the course of his career, he has used a wide range of media and has not shied away from technology.

But Hearth simply does not justly represent Hockneys digital work. Just last month The Art Newspaper featured an item on his digital art in quarantine, highlighting the hope that his most recent work is capable of eliciting.

The Art Newspaper featured two digital paintings in particular, first The Big Tree in Autumn, has a remarkable skyblue in the center of the frame, breaking through the clouds behind the branches of the tree. There are layers of gray in the clouds. The details of the trees branches and leaves show deliberate use of different textures and opacities. These are advanced techniques regardless of medium.

The Pond in Autumn, made two days later, is even more impressive. Again the range of detail, color, texture, and gesture, while not entirely controlled or pristine, still shows the hand of a skilled and dedicated artist. The tranquility of the water Hockney is able to portray is masterful.

Given the well-honed skill and style evident in these works and others exhibited over the years, why the New Yorker chose or accepted upon commission such a seemingly anomalous painting is a valid question. Hockney is clearly in command of his faculties, making it seem all the more likely that the irreverence and slap-dash nature of Hearth are an intentional thumbing of the nose at the magazines grandiosity.

This is also not the first iPad sketch from Hockney that has graced the New Yorkers cover. The three previous digitally produced Hockney covers featured beneath the interviewstill lifes from 2010 and 2011 and a landscape from 2018are all vastly more complex and impressive. It is not just that the study of the fireplace is weak or a departure from the other iPad work he has done at largeit is a departure in quality from what he has submitted in the past to this same magazine and this same art director.

Responding to Livingstones critique, Sterling Crispin suggested that Hearth was in continuity with Hockneys previous digital work:

But thats part of the appeal, hard for people to understand its supposed to be sort of shitty, Crispin continued.

Given, again, Hockneys stated mission to complete 220 paintings in 2020, its safe to say we cant expect all of them to be bangers. So yes, some are going to have that intentional shitty crude quality to themthat is not the surprise. The surprise is that he chose to shoddily iPad it in for the cover of one of the most prestigious magazines in the world after a year of social uprisings calling for the cultural standard bearers to be more inclusive in who and what they chose to promote. At a moment when art, almost alone among human endeavors, can offer us beauty and inspiration, or solace and consolation, or distraction and humor, or any other variety of grace, Hockney and the New Yorker give us this?

Kyle Chaykausing a logical fallacy to bait the conversation away from why or why not the painting is shitty and why was it chosen to well actually, it is a virtue that the painting is shittychimed in with this bit of wisdom: making people mad is a great side-effect of art. It can be, yes. It is also the intended effect of trolling.

Chayka goes on to invoke a well-known anecdote of dubious origin:

It always reminds me of the story about the woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, That will be $10,000.

But you did that in thirty seconds, the astonished woman replied.

No, Picasso said. It has taken me forty years to do that.

This vignette does not contradict Livingstones point, though. Dashing off a scribble for someone seeking, and willing to pay for, the work of a master is inherently an act of trolling: an instance of behaving provocatively or antagonizing someone. The crux is the irreverence and the New Yorkers acceptance and elevation of it.

Suggesting that the iPads paint app is unforgiving is an insult to Hockney, who has demonstrated that he is perfectly capable of producing very fine work in the medium. It is not difficult to grasp that some media are cruder than others. That is not what is at issue here.

Chaykas and Crispins defenses of the cover are silly. To suggest that there is something shallow or misinformed in taking umbrage at the covers juvenile quality is simply pretentious. This is not a case of my kid could do that but a moment to reflect on editorial integrity (and the possible virtues of shitposting). Because ultimately an editor made the choice to feature that image in all its mediocritychoosing to capstone the year by having an old white man dash off an image severely lacking in technical qualities and at odds with his proven abilities and reputation.

Even so, there is something pleasurable about seeing something done so terribly appear on the cover of the New Yorker. The disjunction is genuinely hilarious. Some have gone so far as to call it iconic. By being elevated to the cover it is able to capture a bit of the 2020 zeitgeist. This is not enough to redeem the digital painting as a standalone work of art. A fittingly shitty end to a shitty year.

Abstraction is still difficult for people!!! Chakya exclaims. Indeed, it seems at least some of the meta aspects of trolling have gone over quite a few heads. But saying a work is purposefully bad doesnt make it good.

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How David Hockney Trolled the New Yorker - The Bulwark

From being the biggest Korean outfit on the scene, the boy band BTS has now become the biggest band in the world. Its the impression youd get from their majestic presence as the Times Entertainer of the Year & theres no exaggeration in this. If pop stardom in 2020 had a mascot, BTS would be it.

Sure, Taylor Swift has given us some of the best music with a countryside aesthetic a much-needed comfort in the year 2020, but BTS has kept the spirits upbeat. They released multiple albums, broke so many records across the board including their own, had a busy life appearing on live streams & bonding with their fanbase, lovingly referred to as the BTS ARMY.

To be able to do that in a year when all the live, in-person concerts stood cancelled is no mean feat, and BTS has shown what theyre capable of, while simultaneously keeping their empathy & love front & center. Which is why when other celebrities seemed to leverage the lockdown, they seemed disingenuous, but when BTS brought new music, it indicated hope.

When Time says 2020 was the year of BTS, theyve evidence to back it up. They talk of the success of BTS, From propelling their label to a $7.5 billion IPO valuation to inspiring fans to match their $1 million donation to Black Lives Matter, BTS is a case study in music-industry dominance through human connection. This sums up the impact of the band very well, so lets expound this evidence.

When it comes to their sticky popularity, the band has its BTS ARMY to thank. The year began with the release of Map of the Soul: 7, the fourth Korean-language seventh overall studio album by the band. Among the many records that the band broke this year is the most views on the music video for their single Dynamite, where they surpassed 100 million views on its debut day itself.

Today, the video is nearing 700 million views. Even on streaming giant Spotify, BTS took away the metaphorical awards. Dynamite is the most-streamed K-pop song this year and Map of the Soul: 7 is the most streamed K-pop album on Spotify. Dynamite opened at the top spot on Spotifys daily Global Top 50 chart when it released in August this year.

While the boy band garnered money & accolades for their work, they were always empathetic & aware of the trials & tribulations plaguing the world. Their activism has an ethos of anti establishment & compassion. Multiple members of the band have been extremely vocal about their challenges with mental health, the quirks of fame, and have embraced non-toxic masculinity as exhibited in their performance.

Even though same-sex marriage is still not legal in their country, South Korea, theyve been vocal about their support for LGBTQ+ rights. This year, they donated $1 million to the Black Lives Matter movement, something Jin from the band claimed was not politics. It was related to racism. We believe everyone deserves to be respected. Thats why we made that decision.

This donation amount was matched by their fandom BTS ARMY in no time. Thats their impact.

Even though their initial plans for a world tour stood cancelled, they ended the year with a bang by releasing their latest album BE. It has been hailed as the music thats closest to BTS aesthetic. With that album, they debuted a song & album at No. 1 on Billboard charts in the same week. More recently, they got another feather in their cap they got nominated or a Grammy.

Even in their interview with Time, theyre candid, It was a year that we struggled a lot. We might look like were doing well on the outside with the numbers, but we do go through a hard time ourselves, Jimin said.

No one can deny the impact of the band on the current zeitgeist & how they made the tough year better for all of us.

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Was 2020 the year of BTS? Here's why 'Time' magazine thinks so - Film Daily