A DIARY OF THE PLAGUE YEAR

An artist chronicles the headlines of an extraordinarily tumultuous year.

As Engler explains in the introduction, she had never imagined her work would find her bearing witness to such momentous upheaval. “I painted the day’s headlines,” she writes, “making a picture of the first few news items I heard emitting from my wooden bedside radio when I woke up each morning.” For much of her career, she writes, “my art had been about depicting the mundane or ordinary to create a big picture, working from the small and intimate to arrive at a greater whole.” Yet 2020 would confound everyone’s expectations, and revisiting it through Engler’s vivid drawings and sharp memories is enough to give anyone whiplash. The impeachment trials and the presidential campaigning dominated the news at the beginning of 2020, with the threat of pandemic barely a whisper. Even as that threat accelerated, there were countless mixed messages in the media, as the virus spread from China across the world, with concentrated outbreaks in New York and elsewhere around the country. By the end of March, the U.S. led the world in cases. A full month later, with the country in various states of shutdown, the same news cycle showed Dr. Anthony Fauci warning of worse to come in the fall and Jared Kushner hailing the administration’s containment of the virus as “a great success.” The author goes on to depict the murder of George Floyd, the rise of Black Lives Matter and nationwide protests, Trump and other associates testing positive, and the chaotic presidential election. The book ends with Joe Biden’s inauguration. Throughout, Engler combines the sharp eye of an editorial caricaturist with the vibrant color of a portraitist, and the energy of the artwork underscores the sense of urgency in the day's news. The accompanying text has a matter-of-fact tone that belies the powerful underlying sense that so much has gone seriously awry.

A dynamic artistic rendering of chaos survived—at least so far.