We write this as we anticipate the two-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown in the United States in March 2020. Remember when things began to look promising in the fall of 2021, at least in the United States and the United Kingdom? We slowly ventured out to restaurants again, organized in-person conferences, and began to meet with students for in-person office hours (although the qualifier “in-person” continues to be necessary when communicating with colleagues, students, and friends in all aspects of life). Then Omicron hit, first in Africa, then Europe, quickly traveling to the United States, the Americas, and beyond. Recent news stories published in January suggest that student morale is at an all-time low and parents are at their wits’ ends.1 This moment of reflection, as we face year three of the pandemic, has caused us to think on the profound effects it has had on us as scholars, artists, and students, as well as on museums around the world. We hope for optimistic news as this goes to press.What happens to the practice of art historical and visual culture studies when mobility is brought to a sudden halt? The past several years have been a forced experiment upon this question. As President Biden recently asserted in his State of the Union remarks, “For more than two years, COVID-19 has impacted every decision in our lives.”2Without question, the impacts on our scholarly research have been acute. Travel restrictions, shutdowns, and delays in acquiring permissions or accessing information hampered investigations for researchers. The effects on US doctoral students and untenured professors were and continue to be severe, delaying dissertation filings and promotion cases. Illness, caretaking, home-schooling our children, lockdowns, and shortages made everyday life challenging. Government institutions such as museums, libraries, and archives were shut down for months; universities, museums, and foundations stopped their affiliates from traveling and rescinded research funding. It became impossible to travel to conduct research, collaborate with colleagues, or secure permission to publish and/or acquire digital images for publications in Europe, Latin America, and North America. Whereas in some cases the lockdowns may have given academics more time at home in which we could theoretically focus on our scholarship, it became extremely challenging or even impossible to finalize publications. We experienced this firsthand as editors for Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, as well as in our own research projects.The economic impact of these closures, delays, and derailments cannot be underestimated. Research conducted by Valerie Visanich and Toni Attard demonstrates the impact on the arts: “the scale of economic shock is resulting in a decline of household expenditure, followed by the secondary ‘multiplier’ impacts of unemployment, loss of personal incomes, and corporate financial distress” during the pandemic.3 That said, we are acutely aware of how fortunate we are to have secure employment and housing, and to be fully vaccinated. If only everyone enjoyed our level of privilege, the world would be a better place.The impacts across Latin America have been acute, from lower vaccination rates and stress on healthcare systems to exponentially increased limitations on capacity for support. With 8.4 percent of the world’s population, Latin Americans account for one-third of virus deaths.4 LALVC contributor and Peruvian scholar Natalia Majluf has observed that pandemic socioeconomic effects have severely exacerbated tenuous conditions that existed prior to the spread of the virus, leaving scholars and students across Latin America with limited access to funding for advanced education, research, and travel.5 Access to vaccines and financial support remain elusive.Over the past two years, the pandemic has shed a light on how crises disproportionally affect marginalized groups. The difficulties and challenges faced by these groups varied by geographic location, economic circumstances, group identity, and institutional affiliations. At University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), about one-third of the student body represents the first generation in their families to attend college;6 it also boasts the largest population of undocumented students of any US university, with about six hundred students (not counting undocumented staff, which brings the number closer to nine hundred).7 These students, and others facing financial pressures, confronted unique difficulties. As University of California students fell ill and lost loved ones, many were forced to take on jobs to support their families. In Los Angeles, the virus hit the Latinx population hard, with an infection rate three times higher than that of the white population.8 Young Latinas and Latinos, in particular, have experienced the virus’s devastating effects acutely.9 A parallel situation occurred in the United Kingdom, where ethnic minorities suffered at a much higher rate.10The effects on academic instruction were profound. In the initial stages of the pandemic, professors quickly switched from in-person to online teaching, rallying to support our students. We learned Zoom and Microsoft Teams and figured out how to reach our stressed and sick students through the screen. Some of us confronted racist Zoom-bombing. We tried to model grace under pressure, compassion, and understanding. We faced screen fatigue; our eyes bleary from hours in front of our computers. Some of us were compelled by our institutions to remain in classrooms despite the dangers of the pandemic. We felt a duty to remain strong for our students, to model good coping mechanisms, to provide a respite in our digital classrooms from the ravages of disease. Many of us changed our course material, incorporating the history of disease or epidemiology into the syllabus. When UCLA rolled out an initiative encouraging first-year undergraduate seminars related to the pandemic, an interdisciplinary team of faculty in residence who live in the university’s residence halls put together a one-unit course, “The Arts in Times of Contagion,” in spring 2020.11 Students learned about pandemics of disease throughout history, from medieval Europe and colonial Mexico to modern Los Angeles. They considered artists’ responses to contagion, the racialization of epidemics, and how zombie movies encode cultural anxiety about disease. One of the professors, a writing instructor, encouraged students to make art or write about their experiences and feelings during lockdown, sharing their work with the class. We did our best, Zoom fatigue notwithstanding.Graduate students, their programs, and graduate admissions were hard hit by the pandemic. In March of 2020, the Fulbright Program ended in-person exchanges in many countries, sending students and scholars scrambling.12 In September 2020, Yale University announced that it would not be accepting new art history PhD students.13 Following this unprecedented decision, other departments in the United States also closed new admissions for the 2021–22 academic year, including those at the University of California, Berkeley. The upside of the decision to stop admitting new students was that departments could support their current students as they faced unknown variables and challenges. These programs were able to provide student funding as outside fellowship, internship, and teaching opportunities disappeared with pandemic public health provisions limiting social interaction around the world. The temporary halt in graduate admissions also allowed faculty the time and space necessary to focus their attention on the existing graduate student cohort and undergraduate student body. Courses moved online, hybrid learning environments were created, and in-person gatherings were limited by social distancing provisions. Other departments similarly rose to the challenge even without limiting admissions. Students in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA were offered modest financial support to offset the extra expenses incurred by online learning, which for some included upgrades to or purchasing computer equipment and paying higher utility bills.Because in-country research plans had to be eliminated or postponed due to travel restrictions at home and abroad, students turned to digital resources and institutional collections closer to home, striving to maintain their research agendas. According to the College Art Association, in 2020 ten students filed dissertations in US and Canadian universities on Latin American and Latinx related topics.14 On the other hand, enrollment of international students in graduate programs plummeted. According to Karin Fischer, “International enrollments are estimated to be down across American higher education [but] the impact is outsized at the graduate level, where one in five students is from overseas.”15While graduate students struggled considerably, they also quickly adapted. Forced into physical isolation, new cohorts adjusted to building community online. At the University of Oxford, with a thriving master’s program, the entire class of incoming students earned their degrees virtually in 2020–21. They attended class, consulted with their professors, and presented their research, all in the virtual environment. To compound things, museums were closed, forcing them into virtual engagements with artworks. Still, Oxford graduated a record number of master’s students in the history of art in 2021.On the upside, new opportunities for research and engagement are being put in place. The Social Sciences Research Council is funding rapid response grants that support cutting-edge interdisciplinary research.16 The Center for Latin American Visual Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, together with the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art in New York, arranged a Latin American and Latinx Art and Visual Culture Dissertation Workshop for April 2022. The workshop targeted full-time students, included financial support, and welcomed students from historically underrepresented groups. Other institutions, such as the John Carter Brown Library, the Clark Art Institute, and the Getty Research Institute, have expanded existing offerings and created new fellowship opportunities, opening up exciting possibilities for scholars in our field. The Clark Art Institute reactivated its in-person fellowship program in 2021–22, increasing funding opportunities, with an eye toward the expansion of the art historical canon, including the Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation Fellowship for scholars working from feminist perspectives, the Caribbean Art and Its Diasporas Fellowship, the Critical Race Theory and Visual Culture Fellowship, and the Futures Fellowship, the latter awarded with the goal of supporting imaginative museum and academic work, as well as public engagement by artists, educators, scholars, writers, and critics.17 These and many other opportunities are available to scholars of Latin American and Latinx visual culture working in the USA and abroad. Thankfully, graduate programs around the world have returned to recruiting cohorts for regular admission.Some organizations continue to struggle, though, offering limited opportunities for foreign and domestic cultural studies research. Princeton continues to limit its Latin American fellowship program. After two optimistic updates in late 2021 suggesting the possibility of restarting its offerings in 2022, the Princeton in Latin America program posted an announcement to its website in February stating that there will be no new applications processed in 2022. Due to ongoing uncertainties and the unlikelihood that in-country placements will be approved, the program has opted to give finalists opportunities to pursue other options at alternative organizations. Fulbright also remains cautious about what field research may encompass in the coming years.18What about effects on the academic job market? During the first year of the pandemic, many academic job searches came to an abrupt halt or moved online as we entered lockdown. Countless 2020 internships, fellowships, and job offers were rescinded. Admittedly, art history and visual culture studies are notoriously narrow career paths to take even in the best socioeconomic times. The competitive market constricted even further, resulting in “a drastically reduced job market.”19 Pandemic delays prevented emerging scholars from completing research, which blocked many from entering the job market. Others faced the elimination of low-wage, low-security part-time and temporary academic appointments. Women and artists were particularly impacted by these economic contractions. Women disproportionately shouldered parenting demands during the first phase. LALVC saw a marked decline in submissions, contributions, and overall involvement by women at this time (a trend that has reversed and returned to pre-pandemic levels). Artists suffered a direct hit from the health, economic, and cultural impacts of the pandemic. They were less likely to produce new work, forge professional and creative relationships, and exhibit their work.20The market seemed to rebound somewhat in the fall of 2020, with entire interview processes now moved online. No longer were preliminary interviews scheduled for national academic conferences (a trend that had begun before the pandemic) and campus visits were ingeniously retooled for digital platforms. Given the tremendous cost savings, we suspect that online interviews are here to stay, at least for preliminary assessments. Search committees and job candidates will no longer need to incur costs for air travel, expensive hotels, or per diem expenses. Similarly, academic conferences also moved entirely online, as witness the College Art Association annual conference, now fully virtual two years in a row (2021 and 2022). Environmental activists had begun calling for more digital gatherings, and the pandemic accelerated the trend. The availability of online conferences and talks is probably the best thing to result from the pandemic, from an academic point of view. Suddenly, lectures across the world became accessible. The scholarly world became smaller and more interconnected.At the same time, as our colleague Jesús Escobar (Northwestern University) reminds us, it is the relationships we share with each other that most often provide the enthusiastic encouragement necessary to propel our work forward and enrich our lives.21 We are all in need of extra care and support at this point. The physiological and psychological impact of this pandemic on first responders, medical professionals, and the labor force that supports these professions has been well-documented. Research has also shown that the shift to remote instruction coupled with pandemic-related stressors has led to elevated risk of burnout among instructors across higher education.22 Furthermore, as mental illness soared among faculty, staff, and students around the world, demands for socioemotional support have become widespread.23 Professionals working in the visual and performing arts continue to face challenges to career advancement as the long-term effects of the pandemic linger. It is critical that institutions work to create policies and procedures that contribute to a supportive working environment for individuals of all ranks. Although we all suffer the public health consequences, it remains our collective responsibility to support those left the most vulnerable by systemic inequality.We are reflective as we enter the third year of this pandemic, mindful of what we, our colleagues, families, friends, students, and communities have endured. We all did the best we could. To bring in an analogy from a different field of expertise, we’re reminded of the ways in which professional and amateur musicians and other performers coped with the shutdowns and their inability to make music or otherwise perform in person. They adapted by working at home, where they could safely record separate tracks, after purchasing the required equipment and upgrading their computers (not unlike what many faculty and students in visual culture studies were forced to do). These separately recorded tracks were then engineered together, joining together to create harmony and ensemble, making possible digital operas, choir concerts, and other musical offerings, and even online plays. Many of us found refuge in arts programming such as these digital concerts, online theater, and virtual exhibitions.While these events offered a measure of comfort and entertainment during lockdowns and isolation, we still longed for in-person happenings. Yes, all the musical parts are there in these digital concert compilations, but they are not the same as live, in-person performances. What’s missing from them is the magic of making live music together in the flesh, the ability to make real, embodied, tangible connections. In live performance, musicians react instantly to one another (and to the audience), to their fellow participants’ music making, body movements, and breath, coming together to create something unique and magical in the process. While we appreciated the opportunities to connect from our separate computer screens as we taught and presented our research, we miss the chance to bond with and respond to live audiences, the enchantment of in-person dialogue, the ability to make intellectual magic with our students and colleagues in the process.
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Mar 18, 2024
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