Paintings from the Pandemic

This year has been one of rebuilding after the never-ending Covid pandemic. People emerged from their homes, began to move around again, were not afraid to touch each other. There were surprise hiccups in the road as the recovery began—new variants on the virus, a staggering economy—but the movement has been toward increasing normality.

That movement toward a better morning is beautifully depicted in After the Storm, a painting created by illustrator Kadir Nelson in what he terms, “a celebration of humanity, determination, faith and solidarity.”

The painting, based on Norman Rockwell’s Golden Rule, is filled with faces of all humankind and is included in In Our Lifetime, Paintings from the Pandemic, works exhibited together for the first time at the Norman Rockwell Museum through October 30th. The exhibit traces Nelson’s experience of the global COVID-19 pandemic while bearing witness to world events as they unfolded.

Hope is a prevalent theme in the show despite some of the more somber moments. In After the Storm people of many ethnicities lift their faces upwards, hope visible in their eyes, as they look to the future.

“Before the pandemic my work was based in history and I was happy living in that space,” the artist said in a videotaped interview. “It wasn’t until I was asked to do the painting, After the Storm, that I saw the social impact a painting could have. In After the Storm, everyone is looking into the rising sun, there is something meaningful to look forward to.”

He told CBS Sunday Morning’s Lee Cowan, “All these people in the painting have their eyes on a common goal, all eyes are trained on the light.” He said he had realized that what people were missing was the human touch and that he was careful to emphasize that in the painting.

“My work is very much rooted in emotion,” he has said. “What we are seeking for in our lives, inside and outside of art, is connection.”

But not all of his paintings depict such innate optimism. As a frequent cover artist for The New Yorker for over the past decade, Nelson was selected by the magazine in 2020, to create imagery to document the turbulent year as the world faced both a global pandemic and critical social and political movements including the death of George Floyd.

“I was a bit hesitant to do George Floyd because it was raw in that moment,” he revealed. He had spent most of his career painting his cultural heroes from African-American society, many of them from the sports world. “I like to tell heroes’ stories through my lens” he has said, “and my lens is people who look like me. It’s telling our story. I seek to ennoble people through my art. When people see my work, they are reminded of the better parts of themselves.”

So the compelling image he created of George Floyd, titled Say their Names is a departure, a dark silhouette of Floyd with portraits of other victims of racial violence and discrimination superimposed on his body.

“Artists will do a painting after someone passes away, whether as a tribute or just something they are inspired but a lot of times the painting ends up being more about the artist and not the subject,” he said, explaining his reluctance. “I didn’t want to fall into that trap. But I thought it was important to say something about what we were experiencing, specifically what I was feeling but also what the country and world was feeling. ... I did’nt think everyone could appreciate how we got to that moment so I felt it was important to document (it) in a way that was reverent and informative.”

Honoring grassroots activism and the Black Lives Matter movement, Nelson also created American Uprising, a modern interpretation of Gerome Delacroix’s masterpiece, Liberty Leading the People, for the cover of Rolling Stone.

Other paintings done during the pandemic mark important historical events, including The Centennial, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Negro Baseball League, and Tulsa, a cover illustration for National Geographic, which tells the story of the tragic events of 1921 that destroyed Greenwood, the affluent African American district of Tulsa Oklahoma.

In Our Lifetime, Paintings from the Pandemic is twinned at the museum with a second exhibition, Imprinted: Illustrating Race, a collection of 300 works examining the history of racial stereotypes in illustration, in which Nelson’s work is also included.

The artist knew his vocation from an early age. He recounts that he was only three years old when he began drawing, encouraged by his art-teacher uncle and an aunt who insisted that he “should take care of his gift.”

“I always considered myself an artist,” he said in an interview. He credited his uncle with giving him a strong artistic foundation that was later expanded with study at the Pratt Institute. He later found inspiration in the works of other artists ranging from Old World Masters like Michelangelo and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, to 20th-century artists Edward Hopper and Grant Wood and illustrators such as Norman Rockwell. He began examining their works at a time when he felt he was not growing as an artist.

“But when I saw these artists, I was inspired by them,” he said. “We kind of pull from other artists and are inspired by them. It is a great thrill … to have my works displayed on the same walls as {Norman Rockwell’s) works. I’ve always loved telling stories with my work and Rockwell was a master of that. I like to feel that I am in pursuit of that mastery.”

Nelson is based in Los Angeles California and has paintings in the permanent collections of the United States House of Representatives, the Muskegon Museum of Art, The National Baseball Hall of Fame, United States Postal Museum, the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne Switzerland and most recently, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, the World Trade Center, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

He received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn NY and upon graduating with highest honors, worked with DreamWorks Pictures creating conceptual artwork for Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated feature Amistad and the animated feature, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. He has received multiple awards, including the 2020 Caldecott Medal and Coretta Scott King Award for illustration

In Our Lifetime, Paintings from the Pandemic and Imprinted: Illustrating Race can be seen during normal museum hours. On September 23rd and 24th an online symposium, Illustration and Race: Rethinking the History of Printed Images will be presented. Visit www.nrm.org for more information.