The United States is in the midst of an epidemic of loneliness. A 2021 study from the Harvard Graduate School of Education pointed out that almost a third of Americans report being lonely. That’s up a fifth, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation 2018 study. American surgeon general Vivek Murthy, who recently declared loneliness the latest public health epidemictalked about three dimensions of loneliness and where they manifest: in intimate partnership, in friendship and in “collective” community, that is to say having a network of people with common interests. These dimensions, in turn, can be the source of a rich social life when fully nurtured. The pandemic has almost certainly played a part in destroying all of these, and we continue to see the ripple effects on society.
Kinship, a new book from the National Portrait Gallery, written by Dorothy Moss and Leslie Ureña (with Robyn Asleson, Taína Caragol and Charlotte Ickes), asks a crucial question: what is kinship in the United States today, and how does it evolve? The book explores this through a series of works by eight contemporary artists and accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the museum, curated by Taína Caragol. In addition to the art, the book includes a series of essays and a discussion with the artists. Work on the project began in 2018 and its timing has increased its relevance.
In effect, Kinship shows that a number of artists have had to deal with the influence of COVID-19 on their process. Thomas Holton, whose photo series The Lams of Ludlow Street portrayed a single family in New York’s Chinatown over nearly a decade, found himself separated from them for more than two months under lockdown – the longest he had been away from them since the beginning of the project. Jess T. Dugan, whose Family pictures The series spans over a decade and focuses on three generations of their family who transitioned to self-portraits and still lifes during the pandemic. Their family photos in 2020 capture the intimacy of life in confinement through a sense of stillness on the bed.
“What was so weird was that [the pandemic] made you think more deeply about family, etc., on the one hand,” artist Sedrick Huckaby pointed out in an interview in the book. “And then, on the other hand, it disconnected you from people.” Huckaby’s “Connection” captures this tension: A papier-mâché sculpture of his daughter, Halle Lujah Huckaby, gazing at her phone, sits in front of an oil-on-canvas painting of her grandmother and great-grandmother in a ghostly figure.
Throughout, the book communicates a sense of kinship as meaning more than blood, but the topics discussed are largely blood relations. Word “closeindeed comes from a Proto-Indo-European word meaning “to give birth to”, and the artists grapple with the tensions therein, where perhaps the expectations of genetic kinship compound the tensions and dysfunctions families over the decades. Jessica Todd Harper’s two-decade series of family photos lit like Vermeer paintings capture the fleeting beauty of life and the growth and loss that occur over the decades.
Anna Tsouhlarakis’ sculpture looks at the family through the prism of the indigenous community, which is perhaps closer to the idea that Vivek Murthy shared of the “collective”. Sourcing wood from her home in Boulder, Colorado, Tsouhlarakis developed a performative work in which she created a portrait of Kaysera stops pretty placesa young Crow woman who disappeared in 2019 – just one of thousands of missing and murdered aboriginal women who have faced horrific violence in the Americas.
Tsouhlarakis (who is of Cree, Navajo, and Greek descent) offers a critique of kinship and exclusion that asks us to consider perhaps one of the most lonely experiences imaginable: being deemed unworthy of memory by society – whether in the portrait of a national museum or in its last moments and memories. “I think my presence in space [of the National Portrait Gallery] is very unique, and it’s temporary,” she points out in an interview in the book. “It’s fleeting, and the interaction people have with native people in their daily lives, especially in Washington, DC, is rare if it happens throughout their lives.”
Kinship by Dorothy Moss and Leslie Ureña with Robyn Asleson, Taína Caragol and Charlotte Ickes is published by the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, and Hirmer Publishers and is available at the museum store and online.
