As the inaugural Charles C. Bergman Endowed Visiting Professor of Studio Art at Stony Brook University, I was invited to conceive a public event, in collaboration with the Pollock- Krasner House and Study Center. I asked independent curator Norman Kleeblatt to join me in this endeavor.

Limited by the restrictions of the Corona epidemic, this virtual exhibition is the result.
It comprises 50 works by 29 artists, a modest selection of recipients of the Pollock- Krasner Foundation grant awarded since the onset of COVID-19. Many of the artists are self-employed; their livelihoods have been severely curtailed by the pandemic. These grants have been crucial in replacing some of their lost income, allowing them to continue and focus on their art.

The selection includes a wide range of media, aesthetics, and artistic strategies, including but not limited to figuration and abstraction. Submitted as examples of the artists’ work for their Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant applications, they were in fact created before the pandemic’s inception. Do they in some way prefigure the catastrophe that followed? Are they expressions of the usual practice of artists working in isolation/artistic lockdown? Or are they some combination of the two?

Historians and literary writers have often described the phenomenon of foreshadowing— the tendency, when viewing the past through the misleading lens of hindsight, to believe that developments unfolded as they did because they were inevitable. Put differently, this assumes that preceding incidents directly prefigure major historical events.

The late literary-historical critic Michael André Bernstein posits an alternative concept he calls sideshadowing. This more subtle theory reminds us that every present moment, every event—major and minor—is dense with a wide variety of complex and sometimes contradictory futures.

While some of the selections in this exhibition may indeed appear to foreshadow our present situation with the COVID-19 pandemic, our intention was to choose works that contain enough interpretive space and poetic oxygen to allow for a multitude of experiences and readings. Ultimately, our aim is to create an exhibition in which history, literature, and art collide in myriad, unpredictable ways.

Knowing first hand the vulnerabilities and needs of living artists, Lee Krasner established the Pollock-Krasner Foundation to offer them vital assistance. Our hope is that this exhibition underscores how Pollock and Krasner’s artistic and philanthropic legacy remains vibrant and relevant, living on directly in the practice of countless artists today.

Shimon Attie and Norman Kleeblatt, Exhibition Co-curators

Acknowledgments: Talya Feldman, Curatorial Associate; Caroline Black, Program Director, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation; Beth Cochems, Grants Manager, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ; Helen A. Harrison, Director, Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center

Seeing Past the Future