From the Curator 

On March 11, 2020, the world changed. On that day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. As the sun rose, people shook hands and drank coffee with strangers; by sunset, offices, schools and churches began shutting down, while hospitals began filling up.

On June 6, the USF Contemporary Art Museum opened Life During Wartime: Art in the Age of Coronavirus. Its first major virtual exhibition, the show asked a select company of international artists to respond to the overwhelming realities of living through a global health crisis. Fifty-four artists answered the call. Each of their contributions, displayed on the museum’s dedicated digital platform, painted a picture of a world in turmoil, while also providing images of hope, humor, and optimism in the teeth of a planetary emergency.

As an epilogue to the exhibition, USFCAM engaged seven artists from Life During Wartime to contribute a single print each to a benefit portfolio. Their work, captured in these pages, commemorates both the difficulties of living through a pandemic and art’s spectacular resiliency during times of crisis. The artists included here muscled through catastrophe. They are Sebastiaan Bremer, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Ellen Harvey, Mark Thomas Gibson, Deborah Kass, Hew Locke, and Narsiso Martinez. When things looked darkest they made art. To paraphrase Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, that is how civilizations heal.

— Christian Viveros-Fauné, Curator-at-Large, USF Contemporary Art Museum

 

Sebastiaan Bremer

Sebastiaan Bremer (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1970)  lives and works in NYC. 

Throughout his career, Sebastiaan Bremer has used pre-existing images to explore deep ideas about time, memory, and processing. In his early years, he meticulously reproduced personal snapshots in paint. Over the years, this process of “re-thinking” past visual documents has led Bremer to experiment with different techniques and materials that alter the image’s material existence. 

In 2000, Bremer created a body work titled I held my breath for 13 hours afraid she would not come home. In this series, he drew a sequence of small dots on top of a photo of his niece Veerle swimming underwater in a pool; these dots subsequently became waves, seemingly keeping her suspended and safe. 

Sebastiaan Bremer’s work has been shown at Tate Modern (London, UK), The Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York), Kunstmuseum Den Haag (The Hague, Netherlands), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, Connecticut), Projektraum I (Berlin, Germany), MOCA Tucson (Tucson, AZ), the Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY), and the Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, PA). His work is represented in the public collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK), MoMA (NYC), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

 

Jake and Dinos Chapman

Jake and Dinos Chapman (Jake, Cheltenham, England, 1966 / Dinos, London, 1962) live and work in the UK. 

The Chapman Brothers have created a unique oeuvre that draws on vast areas of culture, including art history, philosophy, cybernetics and artificial intelligence. The brothers started their collaboration in 1991 and have since been known for their deliberately controversial subject matter. They make iconoclastic sculpture, prints and installations that examine, with searing wit and energy, contemporary politics, religion and morality. Their works are reminiscent of both Hieronymus Bosch’s ghoulish scenes of hell and Francisco Goya’s dark parodies of the Spanish government. 

Consisting of original Goya prints collaged with vintage photos of Yoga practitioners, the artists’ new suite, titled The Disasters of Yoga II (2019-2020), juxtaposes Goya’s images and text with views of Sadhakas engaging in all manner of pretzel-like contortions. The Disasters of Yoga II pays rough homage to Goya in the manner of Robert Rauschenberg’s infamous erased de Kooning drawing. 

The Chapman Brothers’ work has been shown at the Aros Art Museum (Aarhus, Denmark); Blain|Southern (London, UK); UTA (Los Angeles, CA); Arter (Istanbul, Turkey); Kamel Mennour (Paris, France); Magasin III (Stockholm, Sweden); and Serpentine Gallery (London, UK).

 

Mark Thomas Gibson

Mark Thomas Gibson (Miami, Florida, 1980) currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

According to Mark Thomas Gibson, his particular outlook on American culture is derived from his multipartite point of view as an artist: he is a black male, a university professor, an American history buff, and a comic book aficionado. These myriad and often colliding perspectives fuel his pen and ink explorations, revealing visions of a violent, nightmarish and dystopic America. Gibson’s colliding perspectives shine a light on America’s current grim social realities. Like much great satire, they also implicate the viewer in the dystopia they portend, reminding us that, though absolutely everything is at stake, we are all still in this narrative together.

Mark Thomas Gibson has participated in the group shows The Curator’s Eggs, Paul Kasmin Gallery (New York, NY); Woke!, Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida (Tampa, FL); and A Being in the World, Salon 94 (New York, NY). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University and lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

 

Ellen Harvey

Ellen Harvey (United Kingdom, 1967) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Ellen Harvey’s work challenges the way we look at traditional iconography through surprising installations and projects that call attention to the personal, social, or physical conditions under which we understand and view images.

“The Disappointed Tourist series comes from the very human urge to physically repair what has been broken. It makes symbolic restitution, literally remaking lost sites, at the same time that it acknowledges the inadequacy of such restitution. It was inspired both by old postcards of lost sites and by the tradition of tourist painting – both the paintings produced for wealthy tourists to take home and the touring paintings that allowed pre-photographic viewers to experience far-off places. It attempts to honor the trauma underlying the nostalgia that results from our collective and individual losses while celebrating human attachment to places both real and aspirational.” — Ellen Harvey, 2020

Ellen Harvey has completed public artworks for New York Percent for Art, New York Arts in Transit, the Chicago Transit Authority, Boston’s South Station, the San Francisco Airport, the Philadelphia International Airport and the Federal Art in Architecture program. She is a 2016 recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in the Visual Arts and a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program. She has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and internationally and was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

 

Deborah Kass

Deborah Kass (San Antonio, Texas, 1952) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Deborah Kass’s Feel Good Paintings For Feel Bad Times is a set of canvases that use language and the sanctioned stylings of celebrated male artists to express key cultural conflicts. They marshal wit and graphic punch to force a confrontation between the canonical (the orthodoxies established by male artists) and the disruptive (their appropriation by a female artist). The results are demystifying, cutting, and often hilarious. 

Deborah Kass’ work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Whitney Museum of Art (New York), The Solomon Guggenheim Museum (New York), The Jewish Museum (New York), The Museum of Fine Art (Boston, Massachusetts), The Cincinnati Museum, The New Orleans Museum, The National Portrait Gallery-Smithsonian Institute (Washington, DC), as well as other museums and private collections. Her monumental sculpture OY/YO in Brooklyn Bridge Park became an instant icon, and is now permanently installed in front of the Brooklyn Museum and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

 

Hew Locke

Hew Locke (Edinburgh, Scotland, 1959) lives and works in the UK.

Hew Locke has long altered, scrambled, and defaced traditional imagery, with a side specialty in visuals connected to British colonial rule. As a child, the nuns at his Anglican school in Guyana punished him for doodling mustaches and beards on pictures of England’s monarch. Since then, Locke has drawn and sculpted hundreds of heads of Queen Elizabeth II, availing himself of everything from pencils, pastels, wood, cardboard, colored beads, fake jewels, plastic lizards, and toy rifles to construct his royal likenesses. The point of his mangled portraits is subversive in the extreme: they don’t merely vandalize the official histories inscribed in children’s textbooks, they also flesh out the hidden structures of colonialism and globalization tucked beneath the calm visage of Great Britain’s ruler.

Hew Locke’s public artworks include the memorial marking 800 years of Magna Carta, situated at Runnymede, and engaging with the history of human rights. His solo exhibition Here’s the Thing, first seen at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK, and also toured the USA, and an upcoming solo show at The Lowry Gallery in Salford, UK.

 

Narsiso Martinez

Narsiso Martinez (Oaxaca, Mexico, 1977) lives and works in Long Beach, California.

Narsiso Martinez’s drawings and mixed media installations include figures set amidst agricultural landscapes. Drawn from his own experience as a farmworker, Martinez’s work focuses on the people performing the labors necessary to fill produce sections and restaurant kitchens around the country. His portraits of farmworkers are painted, drawn, and expressed in sculpture on discarded produce boxes collected from grocery stores. In a style informed by 1930s-era Social Realism and heightened through the use of found materials, Martinez makes visible the difficult labor and onerous conditions of the “American farmworker,” itself a compromised piece of language owing to the industry’s conspicuous use of undocumented workers.

Narsiso Martinez was awarded the prestigious Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited at the California State University Long Beach University Art Museum (Long Beach, California), Art Space Purl (Daegu, South Korea), Angels Gate Cultural Center (San Pedro, California), Palos Verdes Art Center (Rancho Palos Verdes, California), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (Los Angeles, California), and National Immigration Law Center (Los Angeles, California).

 

 

Further Resources

USF Contemporary Art Museum's Life During Wartime Online Exhibition: lifeduringwartimeexhibtion.org

Printmaking + Sculpture Terms

Printmaking Glossary

Sculpture Glossary

Sales

For sales, or more information about an edition, please contact Graphicstudio at (813) 974-3503 or gsoffice@usf.edu.

Copyright + Reproduction

Images of the artwork are jointly owned by the artist and Graphicstudio. Reproduction of any kind including electronic media must be expressly approved by Graphicstudio.