Nightmares

(continued Daily Drawings during the Covid Pandemic)

Nightmares/ April 24

A month into the national quarantine and numbers of deaths silently continue to rise. Unemployment increases are shouted about in the news. Congress tries to print more money. Alternative stations start floating conspiracy theories. The president encourages protesters to ignore the science, suggests injesting bleach, and screams hysterical over trying to find someone to blame.  No one I know will talk politics, because it is too exhausting and unbelievable. What outrages us one day is overshadowed the next. I feel like I am holding my breath and waiting.

The city, two hours away, empties out and soon all the empty houses on our country road are filled with city people. The stores seem ransacked. There is still no toilet paper to be had. Or whole wheat flour. The trash thrown along the road reflects a higher economic shopper. Maybe we are all high, panting thru stifled homemade masks.

Mask Making/ April 11

I attend church on line, and the local hospital erects a tent in the parking lot to handle the expected rise in patients.  I can’t sleep and worry about my job as a school teacher.

Easter Sunday/ April 12

Hospital Tent/ April 13

The New Normal

(Continuing the Daily Drawings During Quarantine)

Pajamas/ March 27

Feeling wiped out by stress, insecurity, the moon’s position, or imagination, I beat myself up for being weak and dull.  

Wipe Out/ March 21

 Astrological influences aside, we make efforts to dance to the radio, support local restaurants with take-out, sit on the deck at sunset. The calendar loses all its power to define life. Days run into each other, melt, and stop altogether. 

TakeOut/ March 22

I wear my pajamas all day, for days on end, and nobody notices.

Calendar/ March 25

Time for Worry/ March 26

(Self portrait in the hour glass)

 

Life on Pause, Work is Virtual

(continuing the Daily Drawing During a Quarantine)

 

Another Password/ March 19

By the end of March, the mortal predictions were horrendous and our national leaders acted like buffoons. The overwhelming message was to avoid going out, being within 6 feet of another person, touching your face, or touching anything. 

New protocols for work were straining my brain bank of passwords and the ancient computer software systems that I had in place. In order to keep up with scheduled events and meetings, I uploaded, up graded, downloaded and installed until I just had to surrender. Life was on pause and work became virtual, and it was bound to take a toll.

Handwashing/ May 4

Face Touching/May 5

 

Drawing during Quarantine

A Vector at the Door/ March 20

“Quarantine” is derived from the Italian word for 40 days. Back when the Bubonic Plague was hitting Venice, the city leaders took it upon themselves to close their borders and limit all traffic going in or out for 40 days, at the end of which the danger seemed passed, and the word “quarantine” stuck.

On March 13, 2020, when my government leader, (NY State Governor Cuomo), mandated closures of businesses, schools, churches and restaurants…(everything that was not deemed “essential”), I turned to my home and wondered what self-isolation really meant. It seemed very abstract.

The first day I raked the yard and was amazed that nature was still on track, doing its thing regardless of the political fallout or terrorized feelings we were having. 

Daffodils/March14

I reached out and heard from my children and close friends who live further away. 

Reaching Out/ March 15

I felt assured that cleanliness would be the battlefront, and made sure to stock up the pantry. I am still not sure what the fuss was about toilet paper, but all the stores ran out of it early on! We were cautious of visitors and wary of interruptions. Life was already shifting

Soap/ March 18

Stocking Up Provisions/ March 24

Image of the "Mother of Modern Medicine" Inspires Hope for Vaccine.

As we try to “flatten the curve” of stress on our medical facilities and healthcare workers, we pray for a vaccine against Covid19. Doctors are studying patient responses and leaning over lab Petri dishes with questions. No doubt they will turn to the immortal cells of Henrietta Lacks, called HeLa cells, that have helped fight numerous diseases from Polio, Ebola, Parkinson’s to AIDS.  

Who was Henrietta Lacks?

Henrietta Lacks, a young mother of five, died in 1951 at John Hopkins Hospital from cervical cancer that her Doctor noted "looked like pearls". He had stitched tubes and pouches filled with radium inside her cervix, as was standard treatment at the time for invasive cervical cancer. He also took some cell samples from her cervix, without her knowledge or consent, which was also standard practice at that time.

Henrietta, the great, great, granddaughter of a slave, died that same year at the age of 31. Her cells in the lab replicated quickly and continually and amazed the doctor with their seeming immortality. They were the first human cells to reproduce outside the body! Afraid of being sued, the doctor gave the cells a code name, “HeLa” and shared them in labs across the country. They are still the most commonly used cells in research today.

The story turns rough when you learn that in the 1970’s some scientists, with secret agendas, did research on Henrietta Lacks' children without their informed consent. Then in 1975, a family friend asked about the source of the Lacks cells that his coworkers, at the National Cancer Institute, were studying. It brought a light to the two decades of darkness that the Lacks family had been kept in.

A book was written, then an HBO movie. In 2010 the John Hopkins Hospital donated a grave marker to her unmarked plot. It says: “Here lies Henrietta Lacks, Her immortal cells will continue to help mankind forever.”

To say that Lacks is a global phenomenon would be limiting. In 1962 her cells were launched into outer space aboard a Russian satellite for study. Two years ago, the National Museum of African American History ofCulture and the National Portrait Gallery jointly acquired a painting of Lacks. It adds a beautiful and much needed face to the woman often called “the mother of modern medicine”.

Kadir Nelson with his painting of Lacks

Who painted her portrait?

Kadir Nelson (b.1974), an American artist, was commissioned by HBO for the 2017 movie premier of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”, to paint the first portrait of Lacks. An author of several best-selling children’s books on African-American culture and lead artist for Steven Spielberg’s 1997historical drama Amistad, Nelson is known for his larger than life portraits of African American leaders. According to his website, Nelson chooses “subject matter that has emotional and spiritual resonance and focuses on the journey of the hero as it relates to the personal and collective stories of people."

There was no portrait in existence of Lacks save for two small family photos. Nelson used those as well as a vocabulary of symbolism to tell Lacks' story. Standing in a red dress, Nelson paints a yellow straw hat as a halo around Lacks’ head. Her strong faith is reflected in the bible she holds with her hands crossed over her womb. A complex “Flower of Life” pattern against which she stands is the ancient symbol for immortality and exponential growth. The pearls around her neck reflect the doctor’s note about how her cancer grew. A pendant of a nest represents motherhood and the hope of fresh birth. The repeating flower pattern on the dress symbolizes the biological bounty that she shed without knowledge for our salvation. The most poignant details are the two small buttons missing from her dress. They symbolize that something precious was taken from her.

Hopefully, soon the HeLa cells will demonstrate another cure.

Not All Hospitals are Equal

In the light of today, when countries around the world are scrambling to build hospitals, virus test sites, and labs, I can’t help but reflect on the glorious façade of the Ospidale degli Innocenti. Back in the late 1400’s, the Silk Merchant Guild of Florence hired Filippo Brunelleschi, who would go on to become one of the renaissance’s greatest architects, to build the first public building to receive and house orphan babies as community service. 

Brunelleschi pulled together ideas of scale and optics that glorified human proportion and signaled the beginning of the Renaissance in Europe. 

The hospital façade is longer than tall. A colonnade of composite columns rhythmically punctuates the full front. Each column is placed apart at a distance that equals their height and the arcade behind them maintains the same measurement, creating a series of cubes. Sweeping arches fly up from each capital and leap down the length of the building, like a beating pulse. In the triangular spaces where the arches meet there are tondos, (circular framed), ceramic babies in sculptural relief. Above, on the top floor of the 2-story building, the rectangular windows have triangular caps that visually lift the weight of the horizontal building upwards. The design incorporates grey stone and white stucco to break up the space into geometric patterns. The whole building feels light and measured.

Brunelleschi was a trained goldsmith, and sculptor, but when in 1403 he only won second place in the competition to create panels for the FlorenceBaptistery doors, he seemed to quit all that and turn to architecture. He is known for designing innovative machines to help construction, and for his greatest masterpiece, a wonder of the world, the largest Dome of the time, theDome of Santa Maria del Fiore. It is more then 150 feet across and involved construction 180 feet in the air. It took 18 years to build and there were only three accidental deaths recorded! Brunelleschi, a problem-solver, patented many innovations to get the job done. Born in 1377, he died ten years after the completion in 1446 and is buried under the dome.

My son, another problem solver, is working in construction with a company proposing fast pop-up buildings for FEMA. It looks as though they will be made of extruded recycled plastic, and dome like in shape. I wonder if asking for columns and arches would be too much? Maybe some tondos framing the virus?

Poignant Art in Times of Panic

Today with all the news headlines are of crashing stock markets and shutting markets, uncertainty (and insensitivity) in political leadership and a contagious, possibly terminal, epidemic on the loose, we can look to the arts for humor, brevity, distraction or focus. Artists ideate and imagine. Ideation is the process of pulling forth solutions to a question. The role of the artist is to imagine- and that means to give form to an image, movement, or sound as a solution.

I am reminded of an artist who was able to alter a simple iconic image and make it resonate as the voice of the disenfranchised. In his best images he combined rage and tenderness. David Wojnarowicz, (1954-1992), was an American artist at the peak of his career in the 1980’s. Working under the slashing (and insensitive) government of President Reagan and amidst the scorched-earth Aids body count. He turned personal confessional expressions into powerful political activism. Wojnarowicz suffered a life of childhood abuse, homelessness, teenage prostitution, and by the time he was a young adult he was losing his friends to the Aids crisis. His art famously clashed with forces of censorship and repression. He called out, with his art serving as a social critique, the political mythmakers such as Jesse Helms and the conservative Christian’s who would insist that condoms and safe sex not be talked about in schools. Wojnarowicz most famous work, Untitled, 1988-89 is a platinum print photograph taken as a section of a natural history diorama. It is of the American buffalo jumping, one after the other, over a cliff. The image is beautifully developed and hauntingly cropped. It symbolized the hopelessness people felt within the medical crisis looking at government policies. His image brilliantly spoke to the marginalized, from the Native Americans (the diorama story) to the Aids victims.This was seen not only as the swan song of the poor, sick and politically invisible, but as the prediction for our society as a whole if we continued without a change of heart.

Untitled by Wojnarowicz

When a friend apologized for making art that was less than political, that focused on beauty, Wojnarowicz replied, “…these are so beautiful, and that’s what we’re fighting for. We’re being angry and complaining because we have to, but where we want to go is back to beauty. If you let go of that, we don’t have anywhere to go.”

self portrait by Peter Wojnarowicz

 I'm thankful for Wojnarowicz and artists like him that do the dirty work, remind us of death, and of what is valuable (and worth fighting for) about life.