Cover story

Celebrating the art that helped the Bay Area get through 2020

Outdoor concerts, virtual museums and other works of art that helped the Bay Area get through a very strange 2020.

Eventually, everything that has happened since March will seem like one long blur. But now, from inside the pandemic blur, we know this period wasn’t all one thing, but lots of things: There was, at first, the feeling that the world was ending. Then the feeling of time standing still. There was the depthless, lonely silence following the end of every Zoom call and how we eventually hardened ourselves to it.

Sometimes we felt weirdly free (“I don’t have to do anything”), and then maybe an hour later, we felt panicked and trapped (“I can’t do anything”). Sometimes when we called customer service, we heard the agent’s dog barking, and when we walked down the street, we were afraid of everybody. But soon, we all learned the dance of getting out of each other’s way, and that made it better.

Meanwhile, hanging over everything, first as a drip and then as a downpour, was the election.

We don’t need to say it, do we? This has been a strange year — all the more strange because every one of us went through a version of the same thing. That means that when we consider everything that has happened in the arts this year, we can’t look at the arts in isolation. We have to look at them through the prism of 2020 itself.

That’s why our yearend lists are different this time. Rather than just weigh in on our best experiences, we look at the performances, works and moments that best represented the weirdest year that most of us have ever experienced.

To be sure, it wasn’t all melancholy and angst. There were films, music and performances worth celebrating in 2020, that would have been worth celebrating in any year. Indeed, if anything, these plays, shows and artworks were more cherished this year because, in a way that most of us have previously never experienced, it was the arts that helped us through a time of great suffering.

So this is the context we’re acknowledging, and let’s hope we’re not doing this again 12 months from now.

In any case, we’re about to get out of 2020, so that’s progress.

Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle

Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle People watch President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden in the final presidential debate on a video screen at Fort Mason in San Francisco in October.