Amanda D. King—The Locusts
From the artist: The Locusts portrays Amanda’s family’s journey through the loss of her grandfather to COVID-19. This work, created using low-fidelity photography techniques, looks intimately at death by COVID-19 and its resulting impacts on an African American family. To bear witness to these intimate images of grief and mourning is to deeply see the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately harmed Black communities, and to remember one of the 594,000 lives lost in the US. This work moves from personal to the collective by honoring the bravery of victims of Covid-19 and celebrating the resilience and devotion of caregivers while acknowledging the gravity of it all.
The purpose of the installation is to respond to the period of isolation when these images were created and render these images and the unseen moments they capture accessible in ways that disrupt mass media’s one-dimensional portrayal of the pandemic. Amanda desires to showcase Covid-19 imagery outside of the confines of smartphones and computers— as society opens and life moves on, the installation demarcates time and space for those who want to remember.
The images will be curated with care and reflect Amanda’s own devotion to representational justice and the careful handling of Black grief. Additional context will be provided by showcasing messages and conversations exchanged among Amanda’s family during the time.