“Orthodox Jewish wedding party broken up by NYPD, Lower East Side, NYC, April 20, 2020, 10:30 p.m., 2020” (ink and watercolor on paper), by Steve Mumford, in his show through May 14 at the Hampden Gallery at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
The gallery says:
“The work evokes a sense of chaos unique to New York City and there is a sense of muted drama in the way the figures stand on the crowded sidewalk. In the background people peer from their apartment windows; in the lower right-hand corner a caption reads, ‘Someone shouts from window: Go home! People are dying!!’ {in the COVID pandemic} The sense of urgency is potent. Mumford is not a journalist…but instead allows for the complexities and tensions of the event at hand to emerge."