Joyce Kozloff & Fran Flaherty

I wanted to revisit “Targets,” an artwork I created 20 years ago because it was increasingly upsetting to me that we no longer saw the results of aerial bombardment, the “collateral damage.” It is a 9’ walk-in globe in 24 sections, each painted with an aerial map of a place that was bombed by the United States between 1945 and 2000. Some names and boundaries of these countries have changed over the years. The piece expressed my concern about the barbarity of modern warfare: not about a particular war, but decades of US military interventions and the trauma they caused. The maps and charts we see daily about the spreading Covid-19 pandemic are mostly of the US, although sometimes they display the whole world. I decided to investigate the flare-ups of disease in some of the countries represented in “Targets,” as we hear the metaphor of war applied to it daily as a political cudgel.

Joyce Kozloff

In January of this year my brother and sister-in-law flew to Dalian, China to visit her parents and celebrate the beginning of the Year of the Rat. On Chinese New Year’s day, instead of wishing my family Kung Hei Fat Choy, I pleaded with them to come home to the States as soon as they could as the news of COVID-19 spread. At the same time, family and close friends from my home city Manila that immigrated to Beijing, hastily flew back home and quarantined themselves for 14 days. By February 1st, my daily communications with Manila were filled with photos of Chinese Nationals suspected to have the Novel Coronavirus. As my phone buzzed with panicked texts from friends, COVID 19 memes, and requests for donations of PPE’s, the Trump Administration was still in denial that a pandemic was upon us. Being a Filipino-Chinese Immigrant, trauma does not arouse me easily but realized my proud brown self was not as thick skinned as I thought. This crisis created a sense of helplessness, vulnerability, and despair that could only be address with art about the culture of care and compassion. Trauma is a way of testing an individual’s strength and a species’ endurance. But we are only as strong as our most vulnerable. As we are experience this crisis, we are dependent on each others actions; our ability to care for one another is the path to survival.

Fran Flaherty