Looking Back with 2020 Vision

The Missing Year by Chris Plaisted is an abstract representation of COVID-19.

LOOKING BACK ON THE YEAR 2020, HOW DO you feel?

For many it was a year of pain, struggle, and heartache. There was the isolation, uncertainty, and fear of the COVID-19 pandemic, which continues to affect daily life more than a year later. Global climate change, increasingly severe and inevitable, turned the skies red, flooded towns and cities, and added yet another horrific layer of meaning to the phrase “I can’t breathe.” And the police murder of George Floyd, hauntingly recorded for the world to see, renewed calls for action in the perennial struggle for justice in the face of the inequity and oppression that have pervaded this nation for centuries— and still do.

In the face of all this, how do you feel?

This question is the unifying theme of the latest exhibition populating the bucolic landscape of the Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts, the fifth collaboration between Historic New England and the New England Sculptors Association. Titled Looking Back with 2020 Vision, it features twenty-eight sculptures by artists responding to the past year through their artwork. The sculptors invite you, the visitor, to engage in your own way—with their work, with the feelings it conjures in you, with the issues that characterize this chaotic time, and with your place in all of it. The pandemic, climate change, protests for social and racial justice—these are all represented, along with privilege and disadvantage, life and death, immigration, divisiveness, and reflections on self and identity.

These subjects might not seem particularly historical, at least not in the same way as a house from the 1700s, but they are most certainly historic—they have defined the shape of modern life—and there is a strong case to be made that they are, indeed, historical. Not only do the events of the past year constitute “living history,” but they also bring to the fore issues that have affected people in the past, in New England and around the world, and that will almost certainly continue to do so for years to come.

The sculptures of Looking Back with 2020 Vision serve as a bridge: between past, present, and future; between the personal and the universal; between the harsh pains of reality and the beauty of art. The coexistence of beauty and meaning stands in contrast to the Eustis Estate’s interiors, designed in the spirit of the Aesthetic Movement, the credo of which—“art for art’s sake”— contends that art should exist for its beauty alone, rather than to convey a moral or philosophical message. Yet the exhibition bridges even this divide, activating the historic landscape of the Eustis Estate which, in turn, offers visitors space and quiet to take in the sculptures, to grapple with life’s challenges, and to reflect on their own experiences.

Visit Looking Back with 2020 Vision at the Eustis Estate through October 31. The exhibition and the grounds are free and open to the public seven days a week from dawn to dusk. As part of the exhibition’s closing weekend, the Boston-based Continuum Dance Project will perform vignette’s that engage with the sculptures. Further details about the exhibition, the sculptures, and the artists are available online at HistoricNewEngland.org/sculpture.

—Jake Ogata Bernstein Guide, Eustis Estate