Anatomy of Love and Art and Art Shows
A painted fishing pole stretches off the canvas into an actual aluminum rod across the gallery wall. An anatomically accurate papier mache heart hangs from the hook. Both are for sale at my friend’s friend’s art show as American democracy cannibalizes itself.
Valentine’s Day, 2025, fell on a Friday night. An anti-vaxxer had just been confirmed as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. And an artless, humorless sex offender convicted of 34 felonies was elected president of the United States for a second term.
The world is on fire, and the partaking in any artistic joy feels like the band playing as the Titanic sinks. But here’s the thing. As essayist Rebecca Solnit wrote, “Joy sustains activism.”
I’d been writing about politics all week, trying to answer concerned questions from bewildered friends abroad, shocked to watch how fast our government was crumbling into itself like a controlled demolition. I’d been reading the most depressing news day in and day out. Seeking joy felt self-indulgent, almost blasphemous. This funeral is too depressing, anyone want to dance?
“I don't know about you, but it seems to be harder and harder to fight against cynicism or even dread with all that is happening in our world today.
So, today I want to focus on Jesus’ sermon from Luke 6:17-26 and invite us to be encouraged to not fall into cynicism and instead, pursue the cause of justice, especially for the most vulnerable among us, and to see joy not only as a source of encouragement but also as an act of resistance.” - Rev. Benjamin Cremer
One of my favorite people, an NGO executive director and longtime champion of disability rights, sent me a hopeful thread about what we can and should do during all this chaos. One bullet point resonated the most. It articulated something I didn’t have the medical vocabulary to pinpoint: you need to try to regulate your nervous system. We are eating fear and breathing nonstop panic right now.
If you are regularly reading the news, your nervous system is most likely dysregulated. It’s why you’re having trouble sleeping, why you find yourself clenching your jaw all the time. It’s the low-grade dread running in the background at all times.
On the night of the art show, I was in no mood for small talk. But the invitation was too perfect: “Anatomy of Love”, at a new gallery in an old neighborhood, defiantly balancing itself between revitalization and gentrification for decades.
A friend’s friend was showing some pieces. And for the first time in days? weeks? I did full hair and makeup and wore one of my favorite dresses instead of dayjamas, a fabric-y attempt to look brighter than I actually felt. And to support the arts on the day cuts were announced to the National Endowment for the Arts. That same week, the man who’d ordered the destruction of the beloved bronze latticework and Art Deco friezes from the historic Bonwit Teller building, the man who’d promised these cherished artworks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art,1 crowned himself boy king of the Kennedy Center and dismissed every director appointed by his predecessor.
Said friend normally only sees me in pajamas when I come over to do the most casual of yoga and play with his cat. He did a double-take when we came out of the dark sidewalk and into the lights of the small lobby.
“Oh! You, you’re, you — festooned!” He is a librarian with a delightful, almost avuncular vocabulary. (Shoutout to SAT vocab prep.)
“Festooned” made me burst out laughing—for the first time in what felt like ages.
Inside the gallery space, a long row of tables was covered in chocolates, grapes, strawberries, and flowers. And for the first time, I met my friend’s artist friends.
Despite the fact that I had no bandwidth for chit-chat, we fell into an easy and familiar conversation. They had no interest in pretense either.
I asked my friend, and Rory the redhead with an Irish last name, to join me at the painting that immediately captured my attention. It was not for sale and flanked by two smaller paintings also marked NFS.
“What do you gentlemen think?” I asked, not wanting to draw their attention specifically to the element that caught my eye.
We took to the watercolor like a mystery to solve.
“Is that a frog?” Rory, the multitalented artist and multigenre dancer, asked.
At first, I thought the woman’s bare legs were in a bathtub, a floral robe draped beside her and, inexplicably, a baby hippo resting on her left thigh, just the top and back of his little head visible.
“Yeah, but what size are baby hippos?” my friend, the librarian/pâtissier/Brazilian jiu-jitsu purple belt asked.
We discuss the possibility of it being a gerbil or a hamster, but the boys agree it has to be a frog. Something in me really needs it to be a baby hippo, but the scale is indeed off.
We speculate whether the dark feathery movement between her legs is pubic hair floating away (for what metaphor I don’t know) or, as the boys believe, an abstract tattoo.
Rory the dancing artist questions the thirds. Why are her legs and the indeterminate animal all the way in the right third of the painting and waaay in the left is her robe? He thinks it’s a pillow, that she’s sitting on the edge of a bed, not in a bathtub, and that this should be two separate paintings. A tired part of my brain feels energized analyzing the possibilities.
When the DJ comes over to greet our mutual friend, the three of us strangers get to talking and find out that we’re all from this same town, that we all went to different high schools, and that we all graduated within the same two years. The conversation quickly turns to racism and sexism, not as abstract academic topics but our own personal experiences.
It reeks of Easter lilies, dramatically beautiful as they are, and I inch back toward the baby hippo, but it’s the lovely kind of natural conversation that’s rare among strangers, and I don’t want to interrupt the flow.
We lament how hard it is to speak up and do the right thing sometimes, especially in the moment, especially when it would be most consequential.
Daisy, my friend’s photographer friend, is holding her dog’s leash in one hand and gestures to some of her pieces with the other. Miss Risa is a tiny new addition to her family and is still nervous around new people. She’s parked herself between Daisy’s feet, and I notice there are cartoon dog faces on her ballet flats. When I ask her about the photo, she gestures to her feet and imitates the day she traced the words in the sand with her big toe. The words fill the bottom left of the photo, diagonal, pointing at the sun. “Love will save us.”
I’m so charmed by Daisy’s ready smile. She is pretty and seems happy, bopping to the music with a natural lightness. She was, in a word, effusive, and I instantly liked her. I was fighting a cold, and we’re all fighting the fall of democracy, but I felt human again. Briefly.
Isn’t it always human nature to create beauty in chaos?
Landscape architect Sayaka Akayama’s PhD research explores 3D modeling of Japanese-style gardens in WWII incarceration camps. Of the three types of gardens these persecuted families were able to create, some were ornamental, with no edible crops.2 In the drab rows of sameness, detainees recreated a sense of home amidst the barracks. They managed to bring in stones, tall grasses, and even pine saplings.3 They built ponds and small bridges.
The creativity people in pain are still capable of is extraordinary.
My dear friends and enemies (my new favorite gender-neutral address), I hope you can create and consume art.
I hope you are able to make time for unexpected conversations with old friends and new people. Keep laughing.
I hope you hear new music that stops you in your tracks.
When you can, hit reset, so you can keep fighting. But resist the temptation to hibernate until this “passes”. This is not about “getting through” the next four years. The collective apparatus in power is not just the MAGA administration. It is private citizens, the billionaire class, the unemployed old-fashioned racists, Project 2025, the America First Policy Institute, and major components of the Republican Party. If the political pendulum swings in the next election, it is unlikely they will concede a peaceful transition of power. We have already seen it.
This is not the first threat to American democracy. And it won’t be the last. But as long as openhearted people are creating art, keep being moved by it.
Stay informed and stay vigilant. But everywhere you can, stay joyful.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/donald-trump-bonwit-teller-friezes-met-2132673
https://siliconvalleyrotary.com/meetings/meeting-11-25-24?rq=Sayaka
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13527258.2024.2369549#d1e481