Western Michigan University’s Richmond Center for Visual Arts announces a major exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Esther Pearl Watson’s newest body of work, Safer at Home: Pandemic Paintings. Coolly observational and poignantly confessional, a chronology of more than one hundred intimately-scaled paintings capture the circumstances of life in 2020 during the onset of COVID-19. Premiering at Vielmetter Los Angeles in January of 2021, Esther Pearl Watson’s Safer at Home: Pandemic Paintings will open at the Richmond Center on September 23rd and remain on view through November 14th, 2021.

Revered for her “memory paintings,” Watson’s Safer at Home series is based not only on the artist’s personal experience of pandemic life in Los Angeles, but also on meticulously researched news articles that report the year’s cascade of historic events. From the heart-wrenching consequences of quarantine and isolation to the sense of doom ignited by California’s forest fires, Safer at Home documents enormous shifts in accepted realities of daily life. A painting dated July 12, 2020, for example, declares that, “The new normal feels like an alternate version of an earlier life.” Creating the first paintings in March, Watson’s Safer at Home series begins with cautious recollections from January and February and ends with the hope of new era—the promise of a vaccine and the election of a new president and vice president.