Some of the works in the 2021 Winter Member Show perfectly capture the zeitgeist of the moment, while others offer a welcome distraction. They consider the past, sit with the realities of the present, and hope for the future. The works are in the moment, waiting, mindful, but always hanging in there, resilient, not forgotten. They create a pastel halcyon dream of a quarantine that is more idyllic communing with nature than fraught and lonely slog, or they make the best of it, with happily smiling friends just outside the window or a new gang of inanimate buddies to replace those no longer accessible. Represented in the show is the new normal, including masking, portrayed in humorous tones and striking colors, with a quick slide into entrepreneurial opportunity. Also on view are works that confront and deal with the racial and economic realities of our times, which hit hard this summer and continue to reverberate through our collective conscious.

The works celebrate the shared reinvigoration of our relationship with nature, with communal, cultural, and personal histories, with home improvement, with food and its preparation, but also our dreams of a much more tactile and intimate future filled with travel, with hugging old friends and meeting new ones, with milestones and rites of passage that happen in person once again. Sixty-two of over five hundred entries, from a wide variety of media, come together in an exhibition that is timely and so right now and yet universal and enduring. The artworks in the show help us to confront and contemplate our own complicated and contradictory feelings about this oh so odd period in our history, while individually standing out as technically skillful images that tell a particular, individual story all on their own.

– Erin Lehman, PhD, Director of the Art+Design, Art History, Art Education Galleries, and Lecturer in Art History, Towson University