Creative Time is calling upon its community of artists to respond to this unprecedented moment of uncertainty. Starting this week, Creative Time is commissioning a new artist each week to create a timely and original comic as a rapid response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The initiative highlights comics as a means for communicating complex ideas about society, honoring the medium’s long history of expressing the zeitgeist in times of war, distress, and upheaval. It also affirms the vital importance of artists’ voices in shaping contemporary discourse, while exploring the digital realm as an expansive and dynamic public space. Creative Time Comics 2020 features an array of international voices, offering a global perspective on the crisis. The resulting works will be released on Creative Time’s Instagram account weekly, and featured on our website and other social media platforms.
Creative Time Comics 2020 references our long history of interpreting digital platforms as forms of public space, and calling on artists to provide critical perspectives on current events. From the first iteration of Creative Time Comics in 2010, to our global initiative Creative Time Reports, we have long championed work that can circulate widely without physical proximity, and that transforms individual viewership into collective experience.
Each week we will release a new comic by a new artist addressing the ongoing global pandemic. The comics will appear below and on our social media as they are published.
CHITRA GANESH
LOREM LOREM
March 16, 2020
CHITRA GANESH‘s drawing-based practice brings to light narrative representations of femininity, sexuality, and power typically absent from canons of literature and art. Her wall installations, comics, charcoal drawings, and mixed media works on paper often take historical and mythic texts as inspiration and points of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms. Her vocabulary draws from surrealism, expressionism, Hindu and Buddhist iconography, and South-Asian pictorial forms such as Kalighat and Madhubani painting, connecting these with contemporary mass-mediated visual languages of comics, science fiction, news photography, and illustration. Ganesh lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
CARLOS AMORALES
LOREM LOREM
March 23, 2020
CARLOS AMORALES’ practice encompasses animation, drawing, installation, video, and performance; he also collaborates with professional animators, composers, designers, musicians—and even wrestlers. Having grown up under the influence of both Mexican and European cultures, Amorales frequently explores the commonalities and disparities of the two by juxtaposing their distinctive vocabularies. His work is also deeply personal and reflective of emotional introversion; it journeys into a dark world of fantasy, blurring the line between the real and the imagined. Amorales lives and works in Mexico City.
ANDREA BOWERS
LOREM LOREM
March 30, 2020
ANDREA BOWERS’ practice is fundamentally concerned with contemporary political, social, and aesthetic issues. While her work is tightly aligned with feminist concerns, she has also employed various mediums—drawing, installation, video, and photography, for instance—to explore pressing topics such as immigration, environmental activism, abortion, workers’ rights, and sexual and gender discrimination. Bowers lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.