What Stands Before Us: Art in Quarantine is a group exhibition of art created during the Covid-19 pandemic. The exhibition encompasses the wide range of subjects that artists have personally grappled with during quarantine, including social isolation, the global health crisis, racial injustice, and climate change. This unprecedented time has brought new focus and greater urgency to the many challenges we face.

The exhibition takes its title from a line of Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, The Hill We Climb. This poem captured a powerful moment in a tumultuous year, delivering a message of hope and perseverance to a nation reeling from a global pandemic, political tension, and racial injustice. Gorman implores us to: “lift our gazes, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us”; to confront together the many threats to our future.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the events of the past year have led many artists to likewise shift or intensify their gaze. This year of isolation and reflection, of political tension and social upheaval, has brought into greater focus the many issues that currently stand before us, whether personal, political, societal, or global.