♪ (soft music) ♪
Growing up in church,
we used to sing a song called, In Times Like These.
"We need a savior. In times like these,
"we need an anchor"
And I wondered what are the anchors
that are holding my artists at this time.
♪ (soft music) ♪
In Times Like These was an exhibition
that started in July of 2020
and it featured my artists' works that was done during
the time of the pandemic.
♪(flowing music)♪
In the middle of March the gallery closed,
I kept thinking about what are my artists doing
in the studios
and I thought I'm going to contact my artists
and see what they produced.
Because even though galleries have been closed,
the creations of the artists have continued.
They go into their studios. They create.
It's part of who they are.
♪ (soft music) ♪
Obviously, we couldn't have openings.
We still don't have openings and can't.
We can have people coming in, one on one
and socially distancing, in masks.
But I had to get the message out there.
So I asked all my artists to do a video
talking about their work and how this time affected them.
♪ (soft music) ♪
Not all of my artists were familiar
with videoconferencing and all the other things that
we've been doing so much of during this time.
But, artists have a creative spirit
and they're willing to try.
♪ (moderate music) ♪
Hi. My name's Luke Allsbrook.
Welcome to my studio.
Time lost the meaning
that I was used to having for time.
I've been painting
the American South now for over 30 years.
I'm very interested in how
the viewer interacts with my work.
I did start to look at some
elements differently.
What do the bottles mean? There's a mask.
I like to do is have
it look really nice from any angle.
We are the trees.
We are the glacial ice.
We are the trend source. We are everything.
I also ask as I normally do
when I do an exhibition about an artist's statement.
♪ (soft piano playing) ♪
...as well as having access
to a critical analysis by a writer
of the exhibition.
♪ (music fades) ♪
My artists were challenged by this isolation time.
For me, thought processes
had been altered.
He had created a beautiful
series of work,
extremely colorful, positive, southern images
before all of this happened. And Tom said to me
"My mind and my hand are not working."
Something about the air
out there. Whatever was going on
seemed to change what I did
and how I did it or even wanting to do it.
Tom said to me I'll try Sandy.
On a piece of paper,
I had painted one silhouette tree.
Then he drew another tree.
He looked at this composition as almost
like an encyclopedia page documenting trees.
One thing I thought about
was the loss of legendary singer/songwriter
John Prine. I listened to a lot of his work
during this time because his passing
was due to the virus.
The last album that he created
was Trees Of Forgiveness. Tom gave the nod
to that titling his work Trees Of Forgiveness.
I wondered exactly what
did that mean?
I was extremely influenced
by the sudden event of COVID-19
and I tried to paint
the rambling waters and the destruction.
Jeanet Dreskin is the oldest
artist that I represent.
She turned 99 a few weeks ago.
The swirling and the depressing
feeling one gets from being wet all the time,
from life and activity to death.
You can see the turbulence
with the way that she dealt with the waves.
COVID-19 has had
such an influence on everything.
It has affected my paintings, my activities and I'm afraid
it's affecting life as we've known it in America today.
♪ ♪
One artist went back to a piece
that he started in 1995.
It's been a time of reflection.
so for the past several weeks, I reworked a piece
to expand the color palette to work
with some additional development of surface
and build off of what I had started many years ago.
He felt he needed
to complete something.
♪ (song ends) ♪
I find that
many of my artists, all of them really
their hands are a way of their expression
and sometimes they don't know what
to do with their hands
but they pick up their materials
and their materials start to guide them
into creating something.
One of the things,
I found during this pandemic was that making pinch pots,
with each pinch of the clay it seemed to absorb
some of the anxiety that I was feeling.
She had these beautiful bowls
where the glaze was inside
I've also always loved
putting one thing inside of another thing.
There's some kind of interesting relationship there.
She called them
meditation bowls, Lean On Me.
Although, it's a very simple
idea, Lean On Me, I don't know what I would do
without a lot of my friends that I've had to lean on.
♪ (music fades) ♪
There are many different
approaches that my artists used in this show.
Some went back to a happier day
and brought something forward.
Others dealt with social injustice.
I bought the book called
Slavery by Another Name.
There was one photograph about the size
of my thumb of a young man tied to a pickax,
left in the dirt.
It's horrific to think about. Hung up like an animal,
left in the sun.
The reality of convict leasing
which me, as a southern girl, knew nothing about.
A writer can write a book,
a songwriter could write a song,
a lawyer could pass a law, what can a painter do?
All I can do is paint.
This painting,
which was eight feet long, took up a whole wall
of my gallery.
You could see the beauty of the painting
and the expertise that Ed Rice has
and the horror of the subject matter.
Paint with conviction
and compassion caused my idea.
The title of this artwork
is A Night at Home.
John, he's really
one of the most progressive southern sculptors of our time.
The work that John did for this exhibition
was a wall piece.
This was the symbol
of our state, naturally.
It had cut out guns
on top of a house and so forth.
This of course
is like in a danger zone on the side.
On the road underneath
there are these shelves, real shelves.
In our state, we seem to have
a lot of incidents that are domestic violence.
Another issue that we're
dealing with during this time.
Often three or more generations
live in the same space.
The blues is what they live everyday.
♪ (blues music) ♪
A big window is their connection to the outside world.
♪ (blues music) ♪
Leo Twiggs was one
of the first artists to be brought into the gallery.
The gallery has had decades of relationship with him.
His voice has been a huge impact
in southern art and beyond, also.
♪ (blues music) ♪
Then I decided to put
the two paintings together.
In his 80s, Leo still
has a strong voice.
And then George Floyd
was killed.
♪ (guitar music) ♪
There's so many issues
these days for Leo to consider.
and how he has dealt with them.
They should leave their
sheltered spaces and begin marching
in the streets.
And I heard their voices and I began another painting.
Not only is he experiencing it
now, but he's lived through those years of injustice.
I knew I had been
to this place before.
He has found a way
to express himself,
not just in the negativism of all of this,
but also the hope
that we can overcome what we've been dealing with
and the injustice.
♪ (music fades) ♪
In times like these,
art has a role.
Art can be an avenue for change.
Art can make us see ourselves
and how we respond to things.
Art is part of contemplation.
It can be part of solace.
It's going to create something different
in each person. But I think what
this show did is to create more conversation,
to have an interaction, one on one.
♪ (music fades) ♪