'Go home! People are dying!'

“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."

The dramatic Fine Arts Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where’s you’ll find the Hampden Gallery