The Brooklyn Rail

In May 2023, the United Nations World Health Organization declared an end to COVID-19 as a global health emergency. They broadcast this decree without diminishing the possibility that the virus, now endemic, might remain a persistent danger, much less suggesting the cessation of its circulation. Since then we have witnessed the increasing normalization of the threat posed by COVID-19—even as the New York Times reports, at the moment we are writing, that related deaths are rising in the United States to 1,500 people a week.¹ Building on work with psychologist Benjamin D. Rosenberg, epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina has argued for a revisionist phase of habituation to trauma, a mode of pandemic forgetting made possible by the introduction of vaccines, antiviral medications, and scaled immunity.² Infographics crossed by blood-red lines of viral curves serve as part of a visual culture of a disease rendered preemptively historical, more unsavory reminder than omen. Further lockdown is not imminent; that is the condition for a return to order rather than its consequence.

We thus find ourselves in some kind of aftermath, looking ahead but without the consolation of being “after.” The texts and images we have assembled here are, nevertheless, retrospective, insofar as they build upon a project we co-curated in 2022 for the Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment, “Looking After: Conversations on Art and Healing.”³ We cultivated intimacies even while connecting virtually, at a distance; on these pages, we similarly embrace the candor of personal experience, and the heterogeneity of voice as a matter of positionality and also form. Then as now, we examine art’s relationship to the discourses and spaces of healing—or quite otherwise, as with those of incarceration—since the emergence of COVID-19. If our titular “after” has yet to come, how has the pandemic motivated, challenged, served as a metaphor for, or otherwise acted upon the connections between art and healing?

There is another sense of “looking after” taken up here, and that concerns modes of care, of ministering to those closest as well as farthest from us, and of sharing in mutual responsibility. The themes of motherhood and social justice recur across the paintings and retablos, epistolary exchanges, single-author texts, and collaborative statements that follow. (Perhaps it should be noted that to “look after” is colloquially used to refer to nursing, babysitting, and childminding, too.) Many of the contributors give voice to the brutal and systemic inequities that our global responses to COVID-19 laid bare. They set for us a challenge: to critique and resist the “after,” while beseeching us to unlearn, and to remember, the worlds that we have built for ourselves in and through the pandemic.

1. Christina Jewett, “Paxlovid Cuts Covid Death Risk, but Those Who Need It Are Not Taking It,” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/health/paxlovid-covid-treatment.html, January 4, 2024.
2. Jetelina and Rosenberg, “Why Do We Forget After Catastrophic Events?” https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/why-do-we-forget-after-catastrophic?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fwhy%2520do%2520we%2520forget&utm_medium=reader2, April 23, 2023; and Jetelina, “Lessons I Learned During the Pandemic,” https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/lessons-i-learned-during-the-pandemic, July 11, 2023.
3. 3. https://brooklynrail.org/events/2022/06/02/looking-after-conversations-on-art-and-healing/