There’s a clear blue sky and a comfortable coolness in the air, as I’m heading down 10th Avenue towards West 24th. I’m making my way to Lehmann Maupin gallery to see the exhibition Wings of Change by one of my favourite artists, Johannesburg-based Billie Zangewa. The show is a collection of seven silk works exploring her experience living and working in isolation during Covid-19. I’d spent the first month of lockdown oddly comforted by her tapestried depictions of domestic life, which I viewed online. Threaded patches of stitched-together fabric offered a shimmering take on mundane daily activities. Zangewa’s work stirs me to wonder if I, too, could learn to look for silken silver linings in my own domestic life.
I quicken my pace a little. I want to make the most of the day’s outing. The temperature is in the low 60s, a perfect fall Saturday in New York. Except of course for the ongoing threat of coronavirus. Black turtleneck, black cigarette pants, burgundy brogues. I’m dressed in normal fall clothing, a face mask covering my nose and mouth. I see a lone yellowish-brown beech leaf on the sidewalk. It’s hard to believe it’s already October. Lately time has felt distorted. Months pass by in a blur.
Before Covid-19 hit, the last exhibition I’d visited in the city was Nicolas Party’s Pastel, at Flag Art Foundation. I caught it just before it closed on February 15, and right before I left for a whirlwind of speaking engagements in Marrakesh, Johannesburg and Los Angeles, when people like me flew and moved about the globe for the demands of work without a second thought.
I am not used to associating anxiety with a simple gallery visit. I arrived back in New York on March 13, the day the Metropolitan Museum of Art closed, and other art institutions followed suit. When the city shut down, I, like most people, assumed we would all have a little time at home until spring, or early summer. I was unaware that seven months later New York would still be battling the virus.
It is not the only thing the city’s battled since March. New York wasn’t spared its share of riots and looting among otherwise peaceful protests in response to the death of 46-year-old African-American George Floyd, killed by a police officer. I pass a boarded-up storefront, and images from the news of a ransacked SoHo district at night come back to me. Shattered store windows and thick layers of shard glass and broken merchandise strewn across doorways, the store lights illuminating it all like a piece of bad installation art.
Before I leave the city this afternoon, I will walk the few short blocks further down to Gagosian Gallery on West 21st. I need to see the Titus Kaphar painting, “Analogous Colors” up close, part of his exhibition, From a Tropical Space, that opened earlier this month.
In June, Time magazine featured the painting on the cover of its George Floyd issue. Kaphar wrote a poem to accompany it, called “I Cannot Sell You This Painting”. It is about what it’s like being black in America, bearing a litany of names of black lives lost. The first time I saw the image, I wept. Kaphar’s painting is of a black mother in a maroon sweatshirt, her natural hair fanned out behind, and her eyes closed in a solemn mournful look as she holds the silhouette of a missing child to her chest. A glaring white cut-out.
I tilt my head towards the sun, letting the warmth embrace me. The city reopened a few months ago but today the streets are still sparse. It’s the first time I’ve ventured back into the city since March. Barring an emergency and grocery shopping, art remains one of the few things that can nudge me out.
I glance down just as I step over one of those sidewalk footprint stamps you find all over the city. I can’t help myself. I pause to match my feet up in the outline. I read the stamped message above it. “You’re Doing Great,” it says. My lips curve into a smile beneath my mask. “Such NYC spirit,” I think. My anxiety goes down a notch.
The pandemic has seen galleries around the world finding new ways to reach viewers online. In the first two weeks of lockdown, the Metropolitan Museum reported seeing a 95 per cent increase in engagement on its Instagram account, and virtual exhibitions have become the norm for commercial galleries, too.
I was part of that audience. I spent time almost every day gazing at work online, recognising how the visual stories of paintings invite me to reconsider the sorts of stories I listen to, believe, tell or advocate for.
We feel and think before we can articulate, and the arts engage us at that primal place. The pandemic has left so many of us bereft of adequate language to express the experience, but art opens narrative possibilities. Engaging with the visual arts is always a move towards internal and external re-examination. And one thing that has come out of the pandemic is a call for a re-examination of how we live, and an examination of what makes a world recognisable, inhabitable and hospitable, and for whom.
Gazing at paintings over the last several months has been like going to the optometrist when the doctor keeps switching out the lens, saying, “Tell me what you see now. Is it better or worse?” I stare at painting after painting, and when I look back at the world, it’s as though I can hear the artist asking, “Tell me what you see now. Is it better or worse?” Art helps with our vision.
There are some artists I wish had exhibitions in the city now, artists whose work has dripped like streaks of light on the canvas of my darker days. I’ve returned often to the work of South African artist Nelson Makamo. His portraits of children suggest the vast and formative experiences of young lives. In some paintings the children are indifferent to the viewer, going about their play and friendships. In other paintings they stare back at us, curious, defiant, questioning, holding us accountable for the future we claim to be preparing for them. But it is his work “We Create the Culture” that I hold in my mind’s eye. A black girl stands in front of a line of white, seemingly speechless men. She wears a yellow and blue sundress, but her body is radiating light as she places her hand on her chest, claiming herself before the world. Unintimidated. She is the future, the hope I want to believe in.
Then, there are paintings I want to pour myself into, like “Wanderlust”, by the French-Belgo-Congolese artist Tiffanie Delune. Geometric bands of orange sunlight fill a fiery coloured sky full of white birds holding up a singular black figure, enabling her to fly, as they soar between red, grey, olive and lime-green leafy branches. Delune’s lavish and poetic use of shape and colour suggests the possibility that a diseased world might still miraculously and graciously have redeemable corners, even in the midst of justified despair.
I am finally at Lehmann Maupin. The exhibition is downstairs. I move slowly through it, revisiting each piece twice. At the end I stop to stand before the work titled “An Angel at My Bedside”. It shows the artist in a vibrant red-and-white dress, asleep on top of peach-coloured bed covers in a peach-coloured room, presumably after a full day of activity, bright red lipstick still on. Zangewa creates her images with incomplete and imperfect fragments of fabric, and on display her cloth paintings transform the ordinary wall into an extension of her canvas. I move a few feet backwards for a broader perspective. I see the image now with fresh eyes, how even in the midst of life’s sharp, acute disruptions, even in the midst of a pandemic that cuts away roughly at the fabric of our lives, we still seek respite. We still need to slip into the normal yet necessary activities that revive us, if only momentarily.
I take a deep breath, wanting to inhale all the radiant, revitalising energy spilling out of the red silk swaths of the tapestry, before I pull myself from the piece, from the room. I make my way to the gallery exit, pausing to press the lever on the anti-bacterial dispenser by the door. I adjust my mask, and step out on to the streets of New York City. Yes, it’s good to be out. No one can see, but I’m beaming.
Image: Billie Zangewa, An Angel at My Bedside, 2020. Hand-stitched silk collage, 31.89 x 46.06 inches (81 x 117 cm)