In this article it talks about art created during plagues of the past. The main themes are that in the beginning a lot of art was religious and people who were infected and pass from the disease were seen as punished by God and will suffer for eternity. Personally, I do not believe I will go this route with my own pieces of art.
Then the article moves onto talking about the next period of work completed during plagues and how the Catholic church wanted to encourage people to help those who are sick. Therefore they changed the narrative in their paintings. Now caretakers were illustrated as saints, and the sick were painted more empathetically.
There was also mention of artists who believed that the power of imagination was healing and therefore depicted works that showed strong emotions such as horror and despair to hopefully inoculate them from the real horrors happening around them.
In Japan, warriors were seen physically armored against and fighting against the diseases.
The last category of types of depictions of plague art was navigating pain through self portrait which I find to be the most interesting read. They showed examples of artists such as Munch and Schiele who became ill during their plagues and how they decided to depict themselves. While I do not plan on becoming ill myself, I am considering creating a piece that shows the mental toll this COVID pandemic and put on myself and the people who live with me.
This article had some overlap with the previous one. It brought up some new works of art such as “Triumph of Death” and “Plague” which showed how gruesome the artist viewed the effects of the plague and how it was sweeping through the streets indiscriminately killing people. There were some previously mentioned painting such as the self-portraits which just shows how important those pieces must have been.
What I thought was one of the more interesting topics that was brought up in this article that the last one didn’t, was the HIV/AIDs epidemic. They mentioned artists such as Keith Haring, and David Wojnarowicz. Their statements on how poorly the US government handled this epidemic I am finding parallels to COVID. The spread of disinformation, individuals and/or groups failing to even acknowledge or respect this epidemic, and the medicine and care being expensive.
Wojnarowics’s “Falling Buffalo” I find to be extremely powerful. It makes you feel the despair the the HIV/AIDs epidemic had on those who were impacted by it. He compares the response to that epidemic to the mass slaughter of buffalos in the 19th century. Thus bringing to our attention how much they both were neglected because of the politicalization of what should have been purely a health issue.
We have already seen the how harmful politicizing a public health issue and yet we are doomed to repeat history.
For my project I will look deeper into artwork created about the HIV/AIDs epidemic as I can see similarities with the COVID epidemic.