Reflections of Pandemic Intimacy

Harvard's Carpenter Center highlights works by Katherine Bradford and Diedrick Bracken

bold colorful figures, with one lying on a mother's lap

Mother’s Lap, by Katherine Bradford 

Image courtesy of the artists and the Harvard Carpenter Center

Katherine Bradford’s color-saturated works often feature bold, fluid forms: swimmers and superheroes, or human bodies lodged within an amorphous frame of time and space. One recent painting, Mother’s Lap, offers softened geometric figures; one is flat-out horizontal, perpendicular to another dressed in tangerine orange with a block of canary yellow across her bosom. The New York-based Bradford made it during the 2020 pandemic summer, “when there was high anxiety about the future and our health and politics and protests and elections and our president,” she said during a talk hosted by the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, “and I thought maybe being on your mother’s lap was a good place to be during all this.”


Diedrick Bracken's nuclear lovers
Image courtesy of the artists and the Harvard Carpenter Center

Mother’s Lap is part of the Carpenter Center’s first post-COVID-19 exhibit: “Diedrick Brackens and Katherine Bradford” (September 24-December 23). Like Bradford, Brackens borrows from figurative, abstract, and representational styles, but his medium is textiles. Using West African, South American, and European techniques, he weaves large-scale tapestries, combining personal and historic themes. “Both artists create dreamlike scenes that snap back and forth between the symbolic and the specific,” noted Carpenter Center Robinson Family director Dan Byers, who curated the show. “Their scenes seem to exist both outside and deeply embedded within this uncertain time, evoking cautions, questions, and desires about our bodies in relation to each other.”

Stuck in their respective abodes, the artists naturally reflected on the pandemic’s impact on their isolation, intimacy, and the capacity for human attachment. Brackens missed tactile connections. He scanned what he had on hand in his Los Angeles home, and used bed linens, curtains, and rugs as a palette. He was also immersed in poetry. The resulting nuclear lovers (woven cotton and acrylic yarn in tones of grays and pinks, at left)reflects the eponymous work by Assotto Saint, a prominent figure in the New York City LGBT and African American art scene of the 1980s and 1990s. Brackens’s tapestry extends Saint’s notion of unearthing post-apocalyptic bodies in repose. “When the world ends, we will sort of bury ourselves together in each other’s arms, embrace,” Brackens explained during the talk, “and when it regenerates, it will be because of the love that we have for one another.” 

Read more articles by Nell Porter-Brown

You might also like

Rachel Ruysch’s Lush (Still) Life

Now on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, a Dutch painter’s art proved a treasure trove for scientists.

What of the Humble Pencil?

Review: At the Harvard Art Museums’ new exhibit, drawing takes center stage

Harvard Film Archive Spotlights Japanese Director Mikio Naruse

A retrospective of the filmmaker’s works, from Floating Clouds to Flowing

Most popular

What Trump Means for John Roberts’s Legacy

Executive power is on the docket at the Supreme Court.

This Harvard Scientist Is Changing the Future of Genetic Diseases

David Liu has pioneered breakthroughs in gene editing, creating new therapies that may lead to cures.

Three Harvardians Win Macarthur Fellowships

A mathematician, a political scientist, and an astrophysicist are honored with “genius” grants for their work.

Explore More From Current Issue

Book cover of "Black Moses" by Caleb Gayle with subtitle about ambition and the fight for a Black state.

Civil Rights In the American West

A new book chronicles one man’s quest for a Black state.

Man, standing in small group of people outside the courthouse, holding a sign that reads "HANDS OFF HARVARD" in red letters

Harvard’s Summer In Court

What Columbia’s settlement means for the University

David McCord in suit reading a book at cluttered wooden desk in office filled with framed art and shelves.

The Pump Celebrates Its 85th Birthday

Giving Harvard traditions their due