As a person of average intelligence who aspires to enlightenment, I like to read books that are way over my head. One of my favorites in this category is “I and Thou,” the seminal work by the Jewish philosopher and mystic Martin Buber. |
I understand you’re just now having your coffee, so will summarize very quickly, in one sip, what I think he’s saying: That the fundamental value in human existence is communion with others. That we find meaning in life through acts of mutual acknowledgment: I’m here, you’re here, and I’m with you. |
I think about things like this often as the pandemic grinds on and we face more and more obstacles to our social and cultural rituals: masks, lockdowns, the devastating loss of life. How much of our social fabric will be destroyed? How much will be returned? |
An Op-Ed by Riva Lehrer today mines this landscape of connection and loss. Riva is a portrait artist who describes how the pandemic has cut her off from the thing she most needs: faces. |
 | | The author’s portrait of Alice Wong, a disability activist, made over Zoom.Riva Lehrer, via Zolla/Lieberman Gallery |
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“Faces are my whole life,” she writes. “I think of the human face as a theater that performs the actor inside, in flickers and puckers and pulls of 42 tiny muscles, in the rise and fall of blood that swirls with our emotions.” Now, those faces are masked. And with no visitors to her studio, she is forced to make portraits over Zoom. |
Without the intimacy of sitting in the same room with her subjects, unmasked for hours, talking, laughing, drinking and eating, her work, and the nourishing pleasure she takes in it, is compromised. “Masks,” she writes, “are both saving my life and ruining it.” Yet she perseveres. Her portrait of the disability activist Alice Wong, made via Zoom, is a striking result. |
There’s another layer to this work. Riva identifies as disabled — she was born with spina bifida — and makes detailed and intimate portraits of those often forced to the margins of society: disabled, queer, people of color, those who are among the most vulnerable to the virus. “I paint to make them visible as they truly are, as bearers of iconoclastic beauty.” |
Zoom will have to do for now. But when we are able to safely see and be seen in this world again, face to face, regardless of status, we will have recovered something precious. Because all real living, as Buber wrote, is meeting. |
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Here’s what we’re focusing on today: |
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