Art as Medicine: Creativity in the Time of Covid-19

“Creativity in the Time of Covid 19: Art as Medicine” is an exhibition that showcases the role creativity played in helping people cope with and respond to the pandemic. The culmination of a four-year grant funded by the Mellon Foundation, the exhibit draws from our global archive of over 2,000 works to provide a glimpse into how artistic expression became a tool for responding to personal and systemic discrimination. Our selections seek to highlight intersectional work from BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and disability communities to call attention to the diverse roles art plays in expressing, processing, and healing trauma. Although each work was produced during a time of unprecedented isolation, this exhibition offers a way to see how art was used to cope, to understand, to forge new connections or hold onto existing ones, and to care for ourselves and our communities. Part of an unprecedented Just Futures initiative to support “multi-disciplinary teams” dedicated to work that reveals the “deep inequities and vulnerabilities…[of communities] disproportionately impacted by COVID-19,” this exhibition asks audiences to enter into the myriad roles systemic injustice played in the pandemic and to appreciate the crucial role of art in transforming spaces of social justice.

Throughout the exhibit, we seek to foreground disability experience through a process centered around accessibility, in all its complexity. Drawing on our final digital archive’s 2,000 image descriptions, we provide QR codes linked to student-read narratives of each artist’s pandemic experience as well as a description of the piece. Each exhibition space has alternate sensory-hours and/or low-sensory spaces, videos are accompanied by audio descriptions, conference schedules include seated yoga, and select artworks have tactile versions created by the Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, a disability-run accessibility non-profit. This emphasis on multimodal access to art is meant to challenge our traditional views of aesthetic experience, celebrating the diverse styles of engagement made possible by disability-centered practice for all.

Please explore the exhibition in whatever forms your bodymind desires. We invite you to listen to stories, image descriptions, and music on the QR codes and to grab an exhibition booklet so you can connect each creative work with the pandemic experiences of the artist and/or take it home to enjoy later.

Host or Publisher Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab