from the editor
A GREAT ESCAPE
Art can take us where we need to be
18
March-April 2021
TALLAHASSEEMAGA ZINE.COM
its cousin the SARS virus,” reporter at large Lawrence Wright wrote in The New Yorker in January of this year. “This assumption was wrong. The virus in Wuhan turned out to be far more infectious, and it spread largely by asymptomatic transmission. ‘That whole idea that you were going to diagnose cases based on symptoms, isolate them and contact-trace around them was not going to work,’ (Robert) Redfield (director of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta) told me. ‘You’re going to be missing 50 percent of the cases. We didn’t appreciate that until late February.’” The first of three critical mistakes, in Wright’s view, had been made in the U.S. The others would be the bungled rollout of testing and a failure to embrace mask mandates. So it was that the U.S. became the world leader in COVID-19 cases. So it was that our lives were undecorated, events were cancelled, traditions interrupted, businesses disrupted. Our lives were as stripped galleries. But art has gone on, demonstrating its irrepressibility at kitchen tables, at garage workbenches, in studios and in the open air. We have discovered anew the value of creation and expression as antidotes to destruction and depression. Not long ago, I delighted in building with my grandson Rivers, age 6, a bird feeder as a gift for a friend. Three hearts were warmed by the experience. I was heartened to read Marina Brown’s story in this edition of Tallahassee Magazine about the commitment to the arts on the parts of Kathleen Spehar and Amanda Karioth
Thompson at Tallahassee’s Council on Culture & Arts (COCA). I was inspired by my own conversations with Michele Arwood and Darlene Crosby Taylor at the Center for the Arts in Thomasville for a story about the public art emphasis there. These days, I pause a little longer each morning to admire the four pieces of art in my office: a mug embossed with sun, sea and surfer and crafted by Brenda Stokes of Holley Hill Pottery in Santa Rosa County; a photograph by David Moynahan of Wakulla Springs of a writhing pod of giant tadpoles, their heads nearly the size of tennis balls, taken at Econfina Creek; a painting by Pennsylvania artist Mark Susinno of an angry pike diving into a submerged tree and fighting to dislodge an Eppinger Dardevle lure; and a sculpted grouper-like fish head, purchased at an art fair in Chautauqua, New York. Art does not flit away like birds at a person’s approach but invites close inspection and presents a slightly different look every time it’s viewed. It’s a great escape. Take care,
STEVE BORNHOFT sbornhoft@rowlandpublishing.com
PHOTO BY SAIGE ROBERTS
My brother was in town for a weekend in which we would work to edit and otherwise prepare his manuscript — about the cultureflattening, homogenizing effects of technology and social media — for submitting to publishers. After a work session, we repaired along with my wife to a favorite sushi restaurant. There, Mark asked our waitress if she or any of her coworkers spoke Chinese. The waitress did not — as I recall, she was a speaker of Khmer — but she presently brought to our table a woman, Emily, who did. Here, then, was an opportunity for Mark to practice his conversational Chinese. Emily, meanwhile, appeared delighted to encounter a Caucasian American who spoke her native language. Mark works for the health information systems division of a multinational conglomerate, the 3M Company, which is headquartered in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, where he and I grew up. His role has necessitated travel to China, including visits to Wuhan, from time to time, and Mark is teaching himself Chinese. He repeatedly put his hands together and nodded deferentially, I thought, as if to say, “Sorry, I’m doing the best I can,” as he and Emily engaged in small talk. Wuhan was in the news. For the first time, American broadcast media were reporting the appearance of an unfamiliar respiratory virus there. Collectively, the four of us (in English) expressed relief that the outbreak was confined to the other side of the world. “The new pathogen was … thought to be only modestly contagious, like
