Five Artists to Follow on Instagram Now

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/arts/design/artists-follow-instagram-coronavirus-quarantine.html

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I have a confession: I find looking at art on a computer to be generally unsatisfying. It’s no one’s fault, really, but digital images don’t capture the complexity of seeing a work in person, especially if it’s a three-dimensional object. The quality of my attention is different, too. Whereas I can spend several hours visiting galleries with only sporadic checks of my phone, I’m prone to refresh my email every five minutes while trying to view anything in a browser — especially now, when the pandemic has heightened my anxiety and distraction.

All this makes Instagram one of the best vehicles for me to connect with art these days. Because it’s a social media app, it doesn’t require a large commitment of time or energy, but it’s also a visual platform already filled with artists and creators posting images of their work, their inspirations, their pets, and more. When I open Instagram, I might see a mini history lesson followed by a meme and then a performance. Chances are I’ll be impressed by someone’s creativity, whether they’ve baked a cake or photographed a shadow just so. The feed opens up a series of small windows onto other people’s lives and minds — something I’ve always counted on art to do and that, in a time of isolation, makes me feel less alone.

Ever since the crisis began, I’ve been thinking about the importance of community — how much we need other people, even as we stay physically apart. The artist Lu Zhang and her husband, Herb Tam, curator and director of exhibitions at the Museum of Chinese in America, have been hosting what they call Virtual Studio Visit Loop, a series of conversations with cultural creators they admire over Instagram Live about the realities of living and working through the pandemic. (Some of the interviews are archived on YouTube.) For each visit, the couple also makes a collaborative work with their painting club P_Lub (which includes the artist Trisha Baga), using the guests’ social media posts, especially old family photos, as source material. While the conversations are down to earth, the paintings are idiosyncratic and slightly surreal. Both reflect the amount of care that goes into the project.

CAConrad, an author who uses the pronoun “they,” writes (Soma)tic poetry by enacting rituals “where being anything but present is next to impossible,” as they once described it. That ability to tune deeply into the world is evident on Instagram, where CAConrad has been posting a poem paired with a photograph almost every day since the end of March. The found imagery in the series, which is titled “Corona Daze,” features empty, often abandoned places, both natural and man-made, and it feels appropriate for our apocalyptic moment. The texts range from biting political critiques to a playful ode to a sweet potato. At a time when I don’t always know how to make sense of what’s going on, CAConrad serves as a cleareyed seer.

If, like me, you’ve started to go stir-crazy sheltering in place for about two months, then Mandy Cano Villalobos’s coronavirus-inspired “Sanities and Solitudes” may speak to you. For years, the artist has been making durational performances in which she carries out a repetitive task with simple materials in order to achieve a seemingly futile goal (like moving a mound of flour with a teaspoon). Now, Ms. Villalobos has focused her obsessive energy on the monotony of being stuck at home. In one video, she scrubs a small patch of floor with a toothbrush; in another, she smashes berries individually with a hammer. Each time, the bang is loud and satisfying.

Art galleries are adapting to the current crisis, with mixed results. Some are trying out online exhibitions; others have gone silent with hopes of reopening in the fall. One of my favorite approaches so far has been that of Tiger Strikes Asteroid (TSA), a network of artist-run spaces that’s started a series of curated, printable shows: Donate any amount and you get downloadable PDF files of the images, which you can print out and hang up at home. The Instagram account highlights individual works as well as people’s creative “installations.” It’s a clever way to shake up the traditional viewing format and to rethink what living with art looks like.

On March 19, a post appeared in my feed: Jon Rafman had restarted arguably his most famous project, “Nine Eyes of Google Street View,” a collection of strange and provocative screenshots of scenes captured by Google’s roving cameras. It struck me as perfect timing. More than ever, we’re stuck experiencing the world through the impersonal lens of corporate technology, but what if, like Mr. Rafman, we were to critically reframe it? He’s also posted images from his series “You Are Standing in an Open Field,” which depicts dizzyingly cluttered desktops set against dramatic painted landscapes. As we sit at our own keyboards, dreaming of the world outside, it’s both funny and painful to see an unsparing collapse of the distance between reality and fantasy.