My boyfriend and I graduated college in May and moved back to NYC to live with my mom and her boyfriend in Jackson Heights (before eventually finding our own apartment later that year with friends). June 23rd 2020 was the date of the congressional and presidential primaries. Earlier that month, I had checked my voter registration and found that I had been purged from voting, even though I’d been registered since 2016. The Board of Elections would not re-register me in time for the primary, saying that it was too late for me to register, despite having been registered already, which led to me contacting the ACLU and helping them with a lawsuit on voting rights in New York. On election day, my boyfriend and I left Queens to vote where we were registered, him in Marble Hill and me in the East Village, near the home I grew up in. After explaining my situation to those at the polls, I cast an affidavit ballot and we left. It was almost 90 degrees and we were sweating and hot from commuting all over the city. We stopped by my childhood apartment building to visit my dad, who I hadn’t seen in person since college because of the quarantine. He wasn’t home yet because he was grocery shopping and I had forgotten my keys, so my boyfriend and I picked up a 6 pack of beers and sat down on the stoop to wait. Confirming that nobody was within 6 feet of us, he popped open the beers with our phones, we lowered our masks and drank. It was a moment of repose after a hectic year of big personal changes and global tragedy, a summer where political tensions boiled over, and simply a busy day in itself. I took a selfie of the two of us, there on my stoop.

I returned to this selfie a few months later to paint because it not only captured this particular day, but also reflects most of our summer of 2020. We were, like so many others, especially recent graduates, unemployed and left to find something else to do. We took advantage of the heat and sunshine, taking daily walks together on different stoops while we listened to music and talked, usually about art, film or politics, enjoying a beer, sometimes playing the guitar and singing too.