In May 2023, the United Nations World Health Organization declared an end to COVID-19 as a global health emergency. There is another sense of “looking after” taken up here, and that concerns modes of care, of ministering to those closest as well as farthest from us, and of sharing in mutual responsibility. The themes of motherhood and social justice recur across the paintings and retablos, epistolary exchanges, single-author texts, and collaborative statements that follow. (Perhaps it should be noted that to “look after” is colloquially used to refer to nursing, babysitting, and childminding, too.) Many of the contributors give voice to the brutal and systemic inequities that our global responses to COVID-19 laid bare.

Source: New York Times March 06, 2024 00:34 UTC