Thinking About the Art of 2020

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Image by Shane Walsh

Our relationship to art evolved over the year 2020. It changed as we changed, and we’ve changed a lot. The very proposition of a ‘best of’ offering for the year 2020 thus feels oxymoronic. “Bestness” in 2020 almost has to be a nuanced discussion about the relationship between us, art, and the world beyond. And that requires a trip through this most tortuous year rather than simply a bulleted list of independent triumphs. 

January 2020 began innocently enough, with the usual bracing expectation of cold indoor hunkering. For Wisconsin artists deep winter has always been a time to use the post-holiday freeze to go on creative sabbatical, so they can unveil in late spring and summer what they conjured up during their seasonal isolation. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet seen the fruits of 2020’s prolonged hibernation, which continue to mushroom, only waiting for the return of public eyes. This is one of the great paradoxes of 2020; that while things have stagnated from a public viewing perspective, production invisibly erupted in art studios around Wisconsin. And the world for that matter. For art viewers, however, last January was our heyday, our Roaring Twenties, and I think viewers remember those two months with the Vaseline-lensed nostalgia a flapper might have at the end of 1929.

It seems like so much more than a year ago when I visited Caroline Kent’s wonderful exhibition Writing Forms at Hawthorn Contemporary. Without a care, I breezily figure-eighted around the gallery in early February imagining the future of figural abstraction. No diseases on my mind, social or biological, only stimulating visual art offered with the prepossessing confidence of a world unaware of what was coming down the chute. I also recall seeing Nathaniel Stern’s dystopian universe of repurposed and degraded consumer technology at MOWA DTN around that time with the privileged detachment of someone working with a human-calamity-timeline of years, not days. Things were hopeful, and the art was good. On the Texture of Knowing at the Haggerty provided a powerful meditation on metaphysics and knowledge, and just down the street at the Warehouse, a brilliant show of Wisconsin landscape art, “On Nature,” excited me about our community’s relevance in a global art discussion. Almost embarrassingly indulgent and innocent experiences looking back.  

Elbow Tips at Alice Wilds

An opening on Friday, March 6 of Shane Walsh’s paintings at Alice Wilds marked the beginning of the end of those salad days of art viewing. The show went forward by the skin of its teeth. I remember the radiating anxiety in the room that night. It was well attended but those that did were preoccupied by the looming health situation. Standard wooly, winter hugs were suspended in favor of the sanitized elbow taps, and almost everyone was more interested in armchair epidemiology than deftly executed abstract compositions on canvas.

In our deepest emotional paralysis during the pandemic, we were blindsided by the sorrows of the George Floyd episode on May 25, and suddenly grappling with a social pandemic to rival the biological. Public events had ceased by this time, but institutions were scrambling for creative alternatives. Activism and public protest became art’s most relevant tableau. Some activists, including artist Ck Ledesma—who was awarded the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Individual Artists this year for his work in social practice—either trolled, shamed or held commercial galleries accountable (depending on one’s perspective) on social media for their failures to address diversity and equity. It left some bruises and inspired some heated dialogue on-line, but looking back, it probably moved the social needle in the right direction.

2020 wasn’t to be year of indifferent observation; it was a year of struggle, reflection, and forced reckonings. A year to air things out for the future. Laudably, the Milwaukee Art Museum created the position of “curator of community dialogue” which was given to a woman of color, Kantara Souffrant. The social upheaval also inspired The Alice Wilds to organize a virtual roundtable that brought together diverse voices to discuss representation in the art world, airing out opinions and solutions to consider into the future of public programming, whenever that returns to normal.

There were stuttering attempts to return to something like a new normal during the summer, with many institutions reopening with restrictions. But those measures ultimately wobbled as resurgences of the virus collided with politics. These competing uncertainties scrambled any working consensus about what public activity should be or look like. Still, there were some notable offerings from galleries before utter confusion set in. Leslie Smith III’s WE STILL PLAY WITH BLOCKS at Hawthorn Contemporary and Mark Mulhern’s delightfully divorced-from-our-moment Gatherings at Tory Folliard would’ve been great to admire in an environment where we could freely gush to one another in person about their awesomeness. But we’re in a holding pattern now, heading into another cold winter, with plenty of doubts about the near future, if not the far one. But as we sit on the edge of our seats, waiting desperately for this overlong suspense ride to conclude, we hope it leaves us with better values for all our endurance. May the lessons of 2020 gift us with a new patience, vision, respect, and appreciation for the details last January couldn’t have provided.

And it happens that those are the best qualities to take into any art viewing experience. While the world has been jerked into chaos and confusion, the refrain I hear from artists is that they’ve been using this time in the studio to make new and great work, drawn from the very struggles that have allowed them the time to isolate and produce. It might be a double dip winter—hibernation on top of lockdown—but this might also yield a double-dip renaissance of artistic productivity drawn from deep reflection and prolonged spells of creativity.

I have a good feeling about the ‘best-of’ for 2021.