Skip Navigation

The Slipstream: Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time

DATES Friday, May 14, 2021 through Sunday, April 10, 2022
ORGANIZING DEPARTMENT Contemporary Art
  • The Slipstream: Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time
    2020 was a powerful and complex disruptor, with the confluence of a global pandemic, widespread protests over police violence against Black people, heightened xenophobia, a contested presidential election, and unchecked climate change. These issues did not emerge solely over twelve months but amplified many long standing inequities in this country and worldwide.

    This selection of works from our collection of contemporary art centers artists of color and shows how the issues they address have taken on even greater meaning and urgency in the context of our current lives. A term borrowed from aeronautics, "slipstream" refers to the turbulence behind a moving object that pulls us along. In the slipstream of 2020, individuals continue to wrestle with feelings of fear, grief, vulnerability, anger, isolation, and despair.

    The works on view, many of which are recent acquisitions, explore a number of the ways people seek to maintain a sense of being in the wake of tumult. Some pieces embrace the beauty and power of nature or the reassuring ties to family, friends, and community. Some offer sites of spiritual well-being, examine how personal views can illuminate larger political issues, or speak to the power of acting collectively rather than alone. Some preserve the simple rituals and joys of daily life. Together, these artworks offer space to respond and stay grounded. gather strength, and consider paths into the future.
  • Connection
    Families—biological and chosen as well as elders and ancestors—shape our identities as individuals and community members and help us define ourselves. In these works, artists consider family relationships through which we locate ourselves in the present and connect to the past.
  • Belief
    Rich inner lives connect us to invisible but strongly felt forces beyond rational comprehension. These artists consider organized religious rituals and solitary individual reflection as ways to nurture our spiritual lives and to be in the other-than-physical world.
  • Nature
    These artists explore different visions of nature. Natural beauty provides an antidote to the stresses of daily life; at the same time, a number of individual and collective actions have negatively impacted the natural world in alarming ways, causing pollution, environmental degradation, and ecological disaster.
  • Togetherness
    From our neighborhoods and nations to our social and political groups, communities offer a sense of belonging and a viable alternative to the model of individual power. These artists consider the possibilities presented by the concept of the collective.
  • Self-Reflection
    Our personal lives are rarely separate from the political histories that shape the ways we see ourselves in the world. These artists explore the intersections between individual experience and overlapping conversations around race, feminisms, queerness, and illness.
  • Pleasure 
    In tumultuous times, experiences of joy, humor, leisure, and rest can hold radical possibilities for transformation. These artists capture moments of everyday pleasure, be they located in family, friendship, and community, in life’s daily rituals, or in creativity and the act of art-making itself.
  • Agency
    Through visual means, these artists reorient the ways power is constructed and historically maintained, often to cater to the wants and fictions of white male patrons and audiences. By centering Black, Indigenous, and queer articulations of resistance and reclamation, they counter normative ideas of history to offer glimpses of other, freer futures.