2019: The Year According to Carolyn Lazard
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2019: The Year According to Carolyn Lazard

To commemorate the year that was, we invited an array of artists, writers, filmmakers, designers, and performers to share a list of the most noteworthy ideas, events, and objects they encountered in 2019.

Carolyn Lazard is a Philadelphia-based artist working in installation, video, and sculpture. Lazard has shown work at various institutions including the Walker Art Center, the New Museum, the Kitchen, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Lazard has published writing in the Brooklyn Rail, Mousse Magazine, and Triple Canopy. Their work, In Sickness and Study (2015–present), is on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through February 23, 2020, in the Walker-organized exhibition, The Body Electric. 

Some things that hit me this year, in no particular order. The image descriptions are in the alt text.

1.
POPE.L: CHOIR AT THE WHITNEY

Installation view of Pope.L’s Choir (2019) at the Whitney Museum of American Art: 1,000-gallon plastic water-storage tank, water, drinking fountain, copper pipes, solenoid valves, pumps, MIDI controllers, electronic timer module, level-detection probe, flow meters, programmable logic controller, wood, scrim, vinyl letters, graphite, microphones, speakers, wires, and sound, dimensions variable. Collection of the artist; courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz. ©Pope.L

This piece is, for me, a perfect art work. Pope.L’s deadly serious institutional trolling found its way through text, water, contact mics, a symbolically heavy water fountain, and copper pipes. I stayed for the full duration of the loop, listening to the water flow through the museum and back into itself.

2.
JOHN WILSON, REST IN POWER

A bald black man with grey eyebrows and beard smiles tenderly.
John Wilson

John Wilson was an incarcerated, black, Deaf activist who worked tirelessly with HEARD (Helping Educate to Advance the Rights of Deaf Communities) to advocate for the rights of d/Deaf people in the carceral system. Wilson was arrested and interrogated without the presence of an interpreter and received a felony sentence at trial. He maintained his innocence while in prison for 25 years until his release on parole this year, only to pass away a few months later. Rest in Power.

3.
CONSTANTINA ZAVITZANOS’S L+D MOTEL AT PARTICIPANT INCA black room awash in red light. Attached to the wall is a clear display case containing red objects. A plywood ramp extends out from the back wall.

A ramp that is both seen and felt that disappears into infinity. An encounter with chance operations through a new aesthetics of quantum love. Vibrationsssss. Access that diverts every formal convention.

4.
SASHA PHYARS-BURGESS’S
UNTITLED PART II & III (WE ALL HAVE TO MAKE COMPROMISES)
AT PHILADELPHIA PHOTO ARTS CENTER

A black and white image. A dark-skinned hand extend out from under a blanket on a bed in a bedroom.
Sasha Phyars-Burgess, Leilani in Bed, New Orleans, LA, 2018

Small gestures, large scale. She manipulates black and white photography towards the care and pain of black life in a way that makes my heart flutter.

5.
MATANA ROBERTS’S COIN COIN CHAPTER FOUR: MEMPHIS

A cutout of mug shot of a black woman from the 1940s or '50s. She holds a placard with an ID number. This image is overlaid on top of a green background.

I was really looking forward to this one. Ecstatic noise, genre bending (it’s corny to say, but it’s really true!). The past, present, and future colliding as one sonic experiment.

6.
CHARLOTTE POSENENSKE: WORK IN PROGRESS AT DIA BEACON

Cardboard ventilation systems are arranged in a gallery space.

It was such a pleasure to see these sculptures in the flesh for the first time. The democratization of form and material in such an earnest and powerful way.

7.
JERRON HERMAN’S I WANNA BE WITH YOU EVERYWHERE
AT PERFORMANCE SPACE NEW YORK

A figure wearing a silver jumpsuit dances in front of a seated audience lit in purple-pink light. The DJ is standing in the background wearing a green dress.

That time Jerron Herman closed out the night with a solo performance that got the whole audience going in until it was just a giant crip dance party. For one night, that performance allowed us to imagine a world in which queer nightlife was accessible to us all.

8.
SAIDIYA HARTMAN’S
WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS:
INTIMATE HISTORIES OF SOCIAL UPHEAVAL

A book cover. On the left side of the cover is text on a purple background and on the right side is an image of an ornately dressed black woman.

Hartman models a scholarship of care work while communing with the dead. She breathes life into the unacknowledged spaces of the historical record, redefining what it means to simply live.

9.
CARRIE ANN LUCAS, REST IN POWER

A white wheelchair user with a tracheostomy and tinted glasses smiles on the street. Another person stands in the background with a medical device on wheels.

Carrie Ann Lucas was a white, queer, disabled lawyer, an ordained minister, and a disability rights activist who engaged in direct action protests with ADAPT as well as her organization, Disabled Parents Rights. She passed away this year after her health insurance denied access to her medication. Rest in Power.

10.
SALACIA: TOURMALINE AT THE HIGH LINE

Three black women in 19th century dress converse in dark lighting.

A day in the life of Black trans sex worker Mary Jones in Seneca Village, the black neighborhood razed to make way for Central Park in the 19th century. This lyrical work has single handedly revolutionized the genre of period film. You hate to see it.

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