This is the United States of Anxiety.

So can I ask you all a question?

A show about the unfinished business of our history and its grip on our future.

Tell me your name and what show or anything, any piece of art that's inspired you in the pandemic times.

What really inspired me was pose because it made me realize that we're getting better as an industry when it comes to LGBTQ representation.

It was Deanna Lawson. She's a photographer and she just captures black love, black people

of all diasparas.

I was incarcerated for two years, so the whole pandemic I was like locked up.

I was seeing people create little cloths into like great portraits of people's families like amazing for me and

that's what people use to pass the time during the pandemic. I watched a whole lot of

comedy people were able to get people to think about a situation when that

something that I've seen definitely pick up throughout the 20-20s.

The truth goes down a little easier with a laugh, I guess.

And you know, there is apparently really some science to that old saying too that

laughter is the best medicine so perhaps some of you laughed your way through these

painful past couple of years. Welcome to the show, I'm Kai Wright, and this week we're thinking about the arts, from comedy to

TV to museums to books, theater. The Tony Awards are going to be on tonight right after our show. I was at an opening for an art exhibit last night in Newburgh, New York. I actually ran into some of our listeners, shouts to our United States of Anxiety

Peeps in Newburgh.

Anyway, the event was for a photo project

documenting Newburgh's Black History

and it kind of led to a hard conversation.

There were a bunch of folks there, all I gathered well-meaning

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