So, How Are You Feeling These Days?

A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience

20 Years of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection The Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia

By James Salomon

Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels,
I don’t know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels,
Look around for the friends that I used to turn to pull me through,
Looking into their eyes, I see them running too.

Jackson Browne, 1977

Hindsight is 2020.

I needed to get in my car and hit the open road, take a private moment to look back at what the year had done. You cannot see the enemy, but suspect it is near, and that presents a very anxious feeling for all of us. There is an ocean of anxiety out there. The perfect storm of a wayward virus, social unrest, political mayhem, economic volatility, and other factors have us running for the hills, so to speak, while being advised to not move too far past our front door. It takes a lot to stay disciplined, but there is a lot on the line. We do the best we can.

With caution and responsibility, I did get past my front door, because I needed to investigate something. Two friends, with a team of others, produced a very powerful and relevant exhibition at the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia. One of these friends is Beth Rudin DeWoody, whose vast contemporary art and book collection reaches far and wide. Well known as a fairy godmother to artists, dealers, museums, and art world in general, her generosity and support does not go unrecognized. The other is Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo, also known for her patronage, who has deep ties to the region and helped facilitate this ambitious project.

The exhibition features over 50 artists, and deals with what it means to be Latin American, or Latinx as I learn, living in the United States. I myself do not have these roots, but the mother of my son is from Santiago, Chile, and I have listened to horror stories of her growing up in the Pinochet era. She arrived in New York as a teenager with her mother, a political refugee. These women made their way, I praise them both on their industriousness and fortitude in getting through some very difficult times. I’ve always believed in the success of Latin(x) communities in the US, with each new generation showing an increasingly powerful presence.

I can further explain what this exhibition is about, but best leave that to one of the esteemed professionals who helped put it together. Amethyst Rey Beaver was brought on to take part, she is a curator for another vast collection belonging to 21c Museum Hotels which has several locations scattered around the United States. Their program, led by Alice Gray Stites, stages compelling art exhibits and events on site and in their communities.

Amethyst writes:
The artists were selected because of the themes of the exhibition: namely anxiety as it relates to labor, migration, resistance, joy, hope, and transcendence in the face of difficult personal and political challenges. While the artists in the exhibition identify  broadly and because identity is always negotiated and changing, we made the decision to use the term Latinx as a way to present an expansive, non-binary dialogue on the multiple and varied experiences Latinx encompasses, along with other self-identifications of the artist’s choosing. The desire to highlight and celebrate Latinx artists in the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection came out of the recognition that as a group, these artists have been systematically excluded from the art market and the traditionally white spaces of art institutions. This exhibition, we hope, is one step towards greater representation and equity for Latinx artists in art museums. There is still so much work to be done.

That said, In the spirit of the show’s title, I decided to reach out to a handful of artists whose works are included, and ask them a simple though loaded question: “How are you feeling these days?”, for the purpose of sharing some inner thoughts and views on the world right now. I also asked if they could help us gain insights into their creations on display.

Come take a ride with me?

FARLEY AGUILAR

This year has been extremely difficult in so many ways that even if the virus gets under control sometime next year, many problems within society have been made explicit. With COVID one can see how disproportionately the poorest members of society are most affected. The fact that the United States does not consider healthcare a human right is really devastating in times of emergency. In many parts of the world the clear division between those that protect themselves and others from the transmission of the virus by wearing a mask and those that don’t shows an extreme lack of communal responsibility. For the US, it’s more concerning because a new dangerous precedent has been set in terms of the distrust of factual information, especially in the realm of science. A profit logic coupled with xenophobic populism has warped everything from factual information regarding climate change and disease to being able to display human empathy.

The piece included in A Very Anxious Feeling, titled Patriarchy, plays very much into general and personal anxieties. Personally, all my work, particularly this one, displays an uneasiness with groups and crowds. All my figures are imbued with a distrust with those they are surrounded by. This is definitely a reflection of my upbringing. I arrived in Miami from Nicaragua as a very young child. My parents were illegal for a few years, and, even though it was never spoken about, my surroundings were filled with paranoia and suspicion of others. I was never allowed, for example, to play outside by myself or go to a friend’s house, for my family this was very dangerous. I believe this sort of relation to the world is apparent in Patriarchy. The atmosphere is heavy and the figures seem stiff with terror. The center figure has the word “help” scratched into his forehead. The light that comes in through the window is cold and the fire place has a raging fire.

In general, I take my images from found photographs, mostly mundane snapshots of the past, that seem to me to capture a transcendent quality of human relations. My work is very much informed by film, literature and philosophy. I remember taking the Japanese servant on the far left of the painting from the 1931 film The Cheat. It’s not a well-known film, but one of the characters in the film was a Japanophile and surrounded himself with Japanese servants. This particular fetish resonated with me, using human beings and culture as fads for elites. Another influence was a short work by Herman Hesse called Beneath the Wheel. It is about a young boy that is talented at his studies and is crushed by his families’ and societies’ pressures to excel. The source image of Patriarchy is of a father with his male children. It made me think of the societal pressures on all children to continue the wheel spinning smoothly. For me children are a minority that are sacrificed to an ideology that is not particularly theirs.

GISELA COLÓN

As an eternal optimist, I am always bullish about the future. My work draws upon this buoyant sense of renewal and positive life force. My oeuvre embodies the real power of my island of Puerto Rico. Drawing upon the raw energy of change, growth, and transformation I experienced growing up on “la isla de Borinquen,” I have imbued my work with the pulsating energy of the tropical El Yunque rainforest, the forceful bravura of el Océano Atlántico y el Mar Caribe, and the soulful vibrancy, vivacity, and resilience of la cultura puertorriqueña. The essence of the Puerto Rican spirit is omnipresent in the soul of my work.

The work in this exhibition, Untitled (Monolith Black), 2016, is the very first work from my Monolith series. The Monoliths are meant to convey evidence of equality, power, beauty, and strength. They come from a place of female power, from a desire to usurp masculine energy and convert it to female strength.  By appropriating classic masculine forms and symbols (the phallus, bullets, missiles, projectiles, rockets) and rendering them into aesthetically ambiguous, desirable objects, the  Monolith  sculptures subvert the traditionally aggressive and destructive references of these objects. Their negative meanings are transmuted into positive energies that address phenomenology and the universal concern of human relationships with the Earth.

The singular monolithic form is reminiscent of the mystery conveyed by ancient cultural artifacts (totems), archeological treasures (Stonehenge), and early civilization architectures (pyramids), from past eras when humans seemed to possess a deeper connection to the intangible world around them. This sense of primitive intuition and biological knowledge becomes even more pronounced when coupled with futuristic properties of the modern era. By imbuing the monoliths with space-age qualities such as refractive surfaces, parabolic curvatures, and high-tech optical construction, their sense of mystery, awe and wonder is heightened. Through the harmonious merger of ancient and futuristic qualities, the Monoliths reference our cosmological origins and desire to reach the stars again.

Through my artistic voice, I have sought to create a world that engages all people democratically and provides a transcendent view of the future. Ironically, creating art through the veil of the most patriarchal bastion of western art – minimalism—has allowed me to dismantle the rigid notions of its structural past, and scale the ivory tower of its intellectual hegemony. In a postcolonial paradox, the daughter of a colony has decolonized, deconstructed, and re-contextualized this conventional canon, forging a realm of new possibilities and universal perspectives.

Through the lens of the Caribbean diaspora, I posit my work as a vehicle for bringing our voices together, by providing access to the vastness and breadth of human experience. I have a vision of equality and interconnectedness through subjective human feeling. All you need is a set of eyes and an open heart to partake in the forces of the universe. You don’t need to have read Donald Judd’s Specific Objects essay, or Robert Irwin’s manifesto on perceptualism, to comprehend what is before you—it can be understood not through your mind, but through your soul. The experience of raw, unadulterated, energy transfer can be felt through the senses of your body in a shared encounter of the human condition. My objects are alive yet have no death. Life force pervades their insides, cosmological mysteries are embodied within, the invisible physical forces of the universe, such as gravity, relativity, space, and time are all manifested outwards into their surrounding environment, and Life itself is laid bare for all to see.

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

I’m anxious about the dangerous upcoming societal problems that will be unleashed by new technologies.  I’m anxious that the population seems so fractured, that it is incapable of uniting together to tackle these symptoms before they are inevitable.
While the current political parties battle for conflicting ideologies, the new sectarian positions have eliminated any chance of dialogue. The Unites States has split in two halves which share the same beliefs: It’s the other half that is “evil and stupid”, while considering themselves “good and smart”.

Both political parties have decided that even the scientific method should be dismissed unless it confirms their pre-existent ideologies.  While Republicans deny any relation between man and global warming, Democrats declare that any biological differences by sex or population are entirely socially constructed. Both sides cancel, and erase citizens they dislike; Recreating the “block” button they used on social media to build environments that solely confirm their beliefs.

It’s in the middle of this shit show where I find myself alone and anxious trying to alert my immediate community about the dangers of the upcoming technological development.  Despite being a Latin immigrant, I feel that my gender and the color of my skin now discredits my voice as a sinful “White Male”.  My interests in complexity and scientific process no longer have space in an era of simple ideologies. The intellectual and artistic communities are hyper-focused on ecology or the definitions of sex, gender and race, and seem oblivious to very serious civilizational problems about to affect the entire human race. I consider myself a Liberal, and a Democratic, but where is this dialogue within my party?
Meanwhile, technology moves forward relentlessly at an exponential pace that all who have learned to think linearly cannot even imagine, let alone comprehend. Artificial intelligence and automation over the next two decades will entirely transform society, closing the chapter of human dominance and introducing a new digital tyrants.

The sculpture presented is one of a long series depicting the upcoming civilizational problems that will be unleashed by technology. The Useless Caste compiles 3D scans as dozens of history’s most notable depictions of martyrdom and pain into a single new contemporary sculpture of global suffering. A warning of past troubles to be relived in a close future under the new tyrant of technological efficiency, resource consolidation and work automation.  A sculpture created in the style of the beginnings of western civilization to alert of its future fall.

ALINA PEREZ

My uncle was a very prominent figure in our family, somehow embodying both machismo and “metrosexual” tendencies at the same time. A police officer for many years, Tío left behind confusion and monumental trauma after taking not only his own life, but that of the woman he was seeing at the time.
In this drawing, Tío Robert is applying a clear coat of polish to his toenails, a gentle act of grooming he’d be found doing on a regular basis. Sitting on a chair covered in a protective plastic, I wanted to capture my uncle in a moment both soft and firm – just like he was. I sometimes wonder if his career as a police officer added to his “my-way-or-the-highway” demeanor, to the anger he held and unconsciously inflicted onto his children, and ultimately to the decision of ending his own and someone else’s life.

My work often touches upon many familial themes, one being how touch can be loving or abusive. I am invested in exploring the ways in which we decide to break these patterns, or to subconsciously re-enact them in our adulthood. How can I pause my active perspective in order to have a deeper understanding of those around me and their actions? Drawing Tío Robert allowed me to slow down and quiet my preconceived notions about my uncle, enabling me to parse out the complex parts of his personality beyond just memory.
Recently, we have all been asked to face ourselves and our past behaviors. Now is the time to turn the lens back onto who we think we are.

Regardless of societal or peer expectations, the most radical thing we can do is be our authentic selves – and only through this way of being, can change happen. As artists, we create the stories and images which disrupt societal norms, allow for creative and inventive thinking, and showcase new perspectives – often revealing harsh truths. My drawings are an opportunity for me to deconstruct and rewrite familial beliefs, biases, and abuse – a way for me to rewrite my own history.
Just like the figures in my artwork, the core of my being (and your being), doesn’t belong to any one time, place or label. I respect the fact that the figures and souls in my drawings can live more freely than you and I, and while I can acknowledge the importance of defining oneself, I can also see how these definitions continue to pull us further apart from one another. I am no longer interested in trying to define who I am, or who you are, as I believe we should all be having more nuanced conversations about identity than the current dialogue allows for.

There is an inherent freedom and power through drawing, and I believe art has the ability to show us the possibilities of worlds where no one has to live through the exhaustion of having to constantly defend themselves, be on guard, or relentlessly attempt to validate their existence.
Tenderness, stillness, and self-reflection are at the root of both my practice and the way I carry myself in this world. By showcasing these moments of pause and reflection, myself as an artist, the figures I depict, and the viewer are allowed to coexist, and look both outside and within ourselves, with mutual respect. Our humanity is dependent on one another’s accountability, willingness to change, grow, and ultimately Love.

ESTEBAN OCAMPO GIRALDO

This piece was created after being in New York City for a year and a half without being able to travel back to my home country, Colombia. I experienced the seasons on New York in entirety, leaving my hometown  to do my MFA in painting, I got my heart broken, and went through an extensive adaptation process to a different  country, culture and language. Once I was able to go back to Colombia, everything looked new and different to me. Even though I grew up with beautiful landscapes and extremely tasty food, I never appreciated its richness until  I had to leave and actually miss it. That’s when I realized that the only thing I wanted and had to paint was my life. My memories and my experiences growing up as a Colombian and Latin American.

It’s funny how this particular painting has been making new appearances in my life. In 2015, when painting the piece, I thought of it as a simple, fun memory of growing up playing football  pretty much every day. Now, during the crazy year 2020, this piece presents itself as the perfect analogy for what we are experiencing. It feels like long gone are the days where you could be that close to another human being, where you could go out and play team sports without worrying about how many human bodies you are in contact with. I know the piece makes emphasis on the fact that all of those football players will be hit with a ball going straight at them, but when I look at it, I don’t feel anxious about that. I do feel anxious when looking at a painting with so much green, it may be the closest I’ll get to being outside playing my favorite sport.

Combining visual references from life and photographs, with imagination, I recreate my memories and everyday experiences as they feel and look inside me. My paintings can’t be placed on a particular day, month or year of my life, nor can they be understood as a literal, recognizable moment. This is what makes this particular piece quite timeless, and that’s why it can be placed in today’s worldwide situation and have the feeling of it being inspired by what and how we are living nowadays.

PATRICK MARTINEZ

I feel good but anxious these days. Excited but cautious about what 2021 will bring. 

I’m interested in language that comes from turmoil, desperation, anger and love. The neon piece I have in the exhibition comes from turmoil. Using the Pan African color combination, it was inspired by the 1992 uprising in Los Angeles sparked by the Rodney King beating. Black store owners would post signs in that read “BLACK OWNED” to avoid getting burned down or looted. I was 12 years then, and it affected me deeply, this is a way for me to show solidarity as well as speak on this narrative that is a part of me. 

This piece was made for the “1992” exhibition at Residency Art Gallery back in 2017. This exhibition was a reminder of what happens when we don’t acknowledge hurt and injustice. We saw an example of that this past June. I hope in the near future we can start to acknowledge truths and injustice in this country.

SAYRE GOMEZ

Everything Must Go.

I made this painting in early 2017 around the time that Trump took office.
At that point, I was thinking about how to expand the aesthetic vocabulary of my practice. I had always been interested in the threshold between ‘painting’ and ‘illustration,’ and with that in mind I started trying to teach myself different faux finishing techniques, like faux woodgraining and faux marbling, for example. 

I started thinking about the dichotomy that the Trump brand really represented.  On one hand a kind of extreme opulence, and on the other a permanent fire sale. I was imagining a future in which everything, all surfaces were made of marble, a kind of extension of the Roman Empire yet outfitted with the familiar trappings of today’s never-ending slogans.  “Everything Must Go,” the text which is rendered á la trompe l’oeil as though it’s been chiseled into marble, was lifted from a liquidation sale at a mattress store. 
I imagine this painting as a sort of artifact from this future civilization, one that has fallen on hard times, no longer able to afford its own opulence, left behind rusty and stained.

MARÍA FRAGOSO

De nuestro jardín de frutas falsas portrays my dear friend Yona and I holding figures of babies, painted wood statues of baby Jesus. We are laying in bed surrounded or framed by red angels with dark curls and wings flying above in circles. Between the two figures there is a fissure, a rosy slit from which the two pairs of figures seem to emerge from.

For me this work is an intimate love letter to my friend, an ode to our friendship. It symbolizes love, sex, fertility, and gender. The scene is a fantasy of motherhood, an opportunity to perform femininity, where its artificiality is made visible. This aspect is alluded in the title that translates ‘From our garden of artificial fruits’. The attention to artificiality is extremely important in relationship to the historical and religious references in the painting, where the immaculate conception, the sense of purity related to motherhood and female sexuality is being subverted. The portrayal of the traditional family is disrupted by the presence of sorority, the two women can stand as sisters as well as lovers, making space for queerness as a possibility and fantasy.

My painting references The Cholmondeley Ladies by an unknown artist at the Tate Britain in London, a beautiful painting of two women, possibly sisters or even twins, laying in bed and holding their babies. When I saw it I was amazed by its strangeness, the two figures are almost identical and have a very unnatural attitude. It was really special and unique seeing two women sharing motherhood. Although this painting is secular it resembles the Madonna and Child iconography in catholicism. An image very present in Mexico, which brought me to the wooden religious sculptures in churches but that can also be bought for your own devotion. I often think of the themes in my work in relationship to the conceptions that have been shaped in Mexico by the Catholic Church, I feel that the narrative in this work naturally presents a challenge but it’s ultimately a representation of tenderness and joy for me.

I’ve had so many different emotions these days, some months have been really worrisome and filled with anxiety, but others have been really nice and calm. I spent this year in Mexico City, after living in Baltimore for some years, which has been really special and I have been lucky to have my family and my partner close to me in these times. Looking back at my painting De nuestro jardín de frutas falsas I think of how much I miss my friends, their closeness and love. I long so much for that intimacy and sense of community that is so vital for my practice.

I’ve also asked the same from the exhibition’s curators, and if it was possible to single out an artwork that speaks to them.

Eva Thornton
Taubman Museum of Art

Carlos Almaraz’s Pink Overpass, a small oil on panel from 1984, evokes a surprisingly visceral reaction. The work does not depict a car crash or the scene of a tragic blaze that Almaraz is best known for, but the impending drama is implicit. The oversaturated pink sky, the purple freeway lanes, even the streetlamps and headlights are all rendered in thick, aggressive impasto. Two vehicles in the lower lane are perched in tight proximity, the brushstrokes behind the red car wavering in an indication of reckless motion. The scene unfolds under a late sunset that is rapidly approaching twilight, infusing the painting with a sense of apprehension.
This suspension in the race against sunset leaves the witness unable to pinpoint a specific crash, rather, they’re forced to linger in perpetual anxiety, teeth clinched for the moment of impact. 2020 concedes no definitive collision, but a series of catastrophic events that never seem to end.

How am I feeling these days? For Almaraz the pieces were therapeutic, for me I’m very much stuck in the gloom and doom aspect of the looming car crash. We’ve seen so many disturbing events this year, I’m still waiting for a “breaking point” or “the last straw” or “we hit bottom”. It frankly doesn’t feel like there is a bottom anymore.
Perhaps this quote from the artist might do well to counter my catastrophic thinking:

“I can’t just paint pretty pictures, because I have fears everyone else does, and sometimes I have to make a picture of these fears . . . somehow it’s less frightening when you see it there in front of you, than it is inside your heart and inside your head.” — Carlos Almaraz, 1986

Amethyst Rey Beaver
21c Museum Hotels

Exhausted.
Angry at Mitch McConnell.
Missing my family and friends fiercely.
Sad about losing my Great Uncle to COVID and for the millions
of people who have lost a loved one to COVID. 
Disgusted that there are a few ultra-wealthy who are
massively profiting but not compensating their workers
(ahem, Amazon, among a whole system).
Thankful to have worked on a project like  A Very Anxious Feeling.
Hopeful about a change in government leadership in January.
Counting blessings that I still  have a job.
Excited to see a vaccine be distributed.
Grateful for the health of my family.

I love Lilian Martinez’s  Yellow Dog  because this painting is actively decolonizing the history of art by including women of color in visual spaces where they have normally been left out. In this scene of luxury, the figure physically takes up the canvas, claiming the right to representation just as her canine friend  recalls historical paintings where they traditionally signify loyalty, wealth, and privilege. Bringing this all into the contemporary canvas, Martinez’s painting is both a light-hearted and deeply serious critique of the history of representation and the present need to construct a different paradigm.

Laura Dvorkin
Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection

I would say, with positivity, that the world is in a period of “transition”. Granted, the world is always in transition. However, this time feels especially  crucial. We are not only facing COVID together, but a variety of systemic  issues that require action. What exists in every country is the inequality of power, the haves and the have-nots.

My favorite moment in the exhibition, a pairing of the works by Elmer Guevara and Ramiro Gomez, really represents the  disparity of privilege, and the everyday comforts of those who have it. 
Kings  Rd  draws our attention to the  service industry  and  Latinx  immigrant  community that goes seemingly  unnoticed. A landscaper and nanny  appear in the background or faceless  and composed ofcardboard, while a white-presenting child is completely rendered in vibrant blue. The child is prioritized, akin to their care. 

In stark contrast,  Guevara presents us with a self-portrait of him as a  child,  assuming a  unique,  adult-like role  for his  parents. As the only English-speaker and translator, Guevara would often make high-pressure, critical decisions for the family, all concealed behind his  Poker Face. 
If we look, we see this disparity everywhere. However,  this selection of works confronts us in the gallery, unexpected, and forces us to see further. It’s  the  power of art.

Maynard Monrow
Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection

Macro / Micro view of the world  summed up via Daniel Joseph Martinez
and distilled through artist and curator Maynard Monrow.

An interrogation of Social, Political, and Cultural mores
through  the lens of urban anthropology  in the form of text.

Unapologetically questioning issues of  personal,
collective Identity and the perception  of differences.

Visual Language as a weapon of mass deconstruction and cultural resistance.
Challenging  systems and dismantling preconceived  notions
present in society in  a cross-cultural critique.