Nurse Tracey

2021

Oil on linen

Overall: 60 × 40 in. (152.4 × 101.6 cm)

Purchased through the generosity of Susan and Robert Klein

2020.33

"Nurse Tracey" belongs to a larger portrait series of essential workers laboring on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic. The series was inspired by contemporary Japanese-Canadian artist Tim Okamura’s own bout with COVID-19 during the height of the outbreak in New York in the spring of 2020, and it features doctors and nurses from Manhattan and Brooklyn hospitals. This portrait portrays Tracey-Ann Knight, DNP, RN—a woman originally from Jamaica, West Indies, who now works as Nurse Manager at NYU Langone Health in Brooklyn. Its focus on a woman of color brings to the fore the racial dimensions of the pandemic—both the large number of people of color risking their lives to fight the disease and its disproportionate toll on communities of color. Okamura, who is half-British and half-Japanese, was visibly different from the other children in his hometown and often mistaken as Indigenous. His Japanese ancestors were forcibly interned by the Canadian government during World War II. Both his personal and inherited experiences with racism shaped the artist’s career and his connections with other historically marginalized communities. As Okamura explains, “I somehow realized this was kind of my life mission . . . to represent those who have been underrepresented, to paint people that I hadn’t really seen painted before—especially in the realm of realist, figurative representation.” "Nurse Tracey" references the now iconic We Can Do It! poster created by J. Howard Miller during World War II to motivate the increasingly female industrial workforce. The woman rolling up her sleeve, flexing her arm, looking directly at the viewer, and uttering the call for collective action was remobilized in the 1980s for the feminist movement and again for the Women’s Marches beginning in 2017. Okamura’s work extends the lineage of this image into the 2020 pandemic and inserts race into its long and predominantly white history.

ProvenanceCreated by Tim Okamura, the artist; purchased by the New-York Historical Society, 2021.

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