A Note From the Editor: Studio Visits in the Age of COVID

Michael Anthony Farley

Black and white image of Teri Henderson, a young black woman with short hair and glasses in a modest hotel room with two beds in the background. The beds have rectangular wooden headboards. On the beds are white linens, and a cat is curled up on the bed on the right.
Screenshot of Teri Henderson, from her Zoom interview with Sandra Abbott

In a typical year, studio visits are one of the most fun parts of working in the arts.

I always love getting a “behind the scenes” look at how and where artists or other art professionals work. In the age of social-distancing, things are a bit different. We won’t be cramming into creaky industrial elevators to ascend to some romantically un-hygenic loft, or piling onto a discount bus line to check out the stuffy back office of a closet-sized art space in the Lower East Side. We’re resigned to interviews over Zoom.

That’s a blessing and a curse. Distance—even when mitigated by video—forces us to rely more on verbal language to communicate. In a writing workshop, maybe that’s not such a bad thing? But mostly, “distance” as a quantitive concept has somewhat collapsed. The experience of talking to a Texan curator in Baltimore City is now virtually indistinguishable from talking to a Chinese curator in Mexico City. A genre-bending artist from Oslo who lives and works in Berlin is just as “close” as a scientist-cum-painter (or is it the other way around?) from Seoul who lives 20 minutes from UMBC.

So maybe our new #YOLO (You Only Live Online) existence is turning out to be weirdly cosmopolitan? One thing’s for sure: this round of virtual studio visits certainly generated some great discussions: