Page 4 - Current | Undercurrent

CURATOR’S STATEMENT

Through icons, photography, sound art installation, and abstracted
or representational painting, Current | Undercurrent, addresses the
anxiety surrounding the country’s ongoing crises and the unresolved
issues that allowed them to manifest. The show’s subjects move from the
general to the specific as it takes for its organizing principle the four key
points that then President-elect Biden vowed to address on his first day
in office: the pandemic, racial justice, climate change, and the economy.

Political art and art based on current events are often narrative or social
realist because their meaning is specific and would suffer from being
open to multiple interpretations. However, In “Ninth Street Women” Mary
Gabriel discusses The Abstract Expressionists working in response to the
use of the atomic bomb and the threat of total global nuclear annihilation.
Neither response to current events limits the art created to a built-in
expiration date. Work about current events can stand alone as timeless
but be created very much in response to its time. Its power comes from an
honest response to those times.

Many of the artists presented here are dedicated to emphasizing and
illuminating a single subject. Artists who deal with climate change and
environmental issues, for example, tend to do so with a single-minded
focus and often have work spanning years in their efforts to call attention to
global warming, the degradation of the oceans, and loss of natural habitat.
Others were compelled by current events to create uncharacteristic
but urgent work addressing such topics as a new awareness of
the depth of American racism and the fragility of democracy.

My thanks to Savona Bailey-McClain, Christopher Stout and M. Charlene
Stevens for their insightful comments and to the staff of Hampden Gallery
for their invaluable assistance.
– Linda Griggs