Quarantine projects curate pandemic-inspired art

Throughout history, quarantines have spurred artists to create (think Shakespeare, Frida Kahlo or Edvard Munch, among others).

Today, thanks to the internet, we’re not so alone during our lives in lockdown. People all over the world are figuring out creative ways to use this time. They’re hosting virtual parties, cooking meals together and posting videos on TikTok.

And, a number of international art projects are harnessing the internet’s crowdsourcing power to curate art about life in quarantine. Many are inviting public participation in the work or finding new ways to bring art to people — and sharing messages of hope and solidarity or “stay home.” 

Related: During social distancing, artists collaborate on ‘Long Distance Art’

Here are just a handful of those art projects, from the United States to the Netherlands to Spain: 

Sound collage 

In Southern California, curator Cassandra Coblentz at the Orange County Museum of Art wanted to document quarantine amid the coronavirus pandemic with an online project.

She realized that many people are tired of looking at digital screens so the museum team commissioned sound artist Alan Nakagawa to create a collaborative sound collage titled, “Social Distance, Haiku, and You.”

In order to make it less daunting for people to participate, Nakagawa decided to use haikus, a Japanese form of poetry with 17 syllables within three lines.

“Haikus are fun because it’s less about creating a masterpiece poem. And it’s more about, ‘Yeah, I could do that, you know — three lines.’”

“Haikus are fun because it’s less about creating a masterpiece poem. And it’s more about, ‘Yeah, I could do that, you know — three lines,’” Nakagawa said.

The museum invited the public to submit haikus via voice memos.

“Originally, we were worried that we weren’t going to get that many, actually. We had no idea that we were going to get over 550 haikus,” Coblentz said.

Related: Artists flock to the only ‘festival’ still on during COVID-19

“From all over the world!” Nakagawa said.

Here are some of the haikus they received: 

Nakagawa connected all of the 550 submissions into a 90-minute time capsule on SoundCloud, which you can listen to here or read here.

A digital museum 

Many visual artists are choosing Instagram as the platform to share their art. That’s where three creatives in Spain host the Covid Art Museum. Every day, they meet via WhatsApp to select images submitted by artists from around the world. The project is only a month old, but it has over 65,000 followers on Instagram.

Related: In a new MoMA audio guide, security guards are the art experts

Irene Llorca is one of the project’s founders. She’s an art director at an ad agency in Barcelona.

“We realized that many of our friends were sharing art about the pandemic. That’s when we decided to create a digital museum to collect all the amazing artwork that was being born.”

The Covid Art Museum “began during the first days of quarantine in Spain. We realized that many of our friends were sharing art about the pandemic. That’s when we decided to create a digital museum to collect all the amazing artwork that was being born,” Llorca said.

To encourage submissions, Llorca and her friends connected with ArteInformado, an Iberoamerican contemporary art market. So far, they’ve received nearly 5,000 submissions from 50 different countries. (Submit your own art to the museum here.)

One of Llorca’s favorites is a painting by Mauro C. Martinez of an American couple on vacation with tan lines on their faces outlining where masks would be.

It’s “the things we never thought of, you know, but probably what is going to happen this summer,” she said.

Related: 5 museums offering virtual art while you’re quarantined

As a curator of @covidartmuseum, Llorca is able to spot worldwide trends in the art. There are toilet paper jokes before infection rates peak in a country. During the peak, the art is all about solidarity.

Stay home and enjoy these hopeful messages  

In the Netherlands, another project aims to get art off the internet and onto people’s walls. In March, two graphic designers, Max Lennarts and Menno de Bruijn, created Stay-Sane-Stay-Safe.com at the suggestion of their friend who is a nurse at a hospital.

“He was asking if we had a nice poster which we can send to him with a nice uplifting message to help the people a bit,” De Bruijn said. “So, then Max thought, yeah, OK, but why only help one friend or one hospital?”

Lennarts and De Bruijn quickly built a website and put out a worldwide call for poster designs targeted at two different audiences: They aimed to send encouraging messages to medical workers and to ask everyone else to stay home. Several graphic design web magazines covered their launch.

As a result, artists in 81 countries have submitted more than 1,500 posters. One poster is an image of two hands wrapped in rubber gloves making a heart symbol.

Another neon-colored poster reads in bold letters, “We will get through this together.”

Anyone can download and print out the posters for free. A printer in Utrecht made hundreds of posters for Dutch hospitals, which they say the staff loves.

“The nice thing about the project is that it’s such a shared crisis that everybody understands the message we want to share.”

“The nice thing about the project is that it’s such a shared crisis that everybody understands the message we want to share,” De Bruijn said.

(Submit your own poster design here.)

Dreaming of a just future 

In the US, a project in Philadelphia called “Fill the Walls with Hope, Rage, Resources, and Dreams” is printing out crowdsourced posters for empty spaces left by closed businesses and schools. Mark Strandquist says he launched the project to help his neighbors dream of a just future.

Strandquist and friends use wheat paste to post them around the city, including in and around all of Philadelphia’s free food distribution sites.

Meanwhile, in New York, artists are collaborating to make the most of the empty billboard space in Times Square.

Also, check out DearFrontline and Amplifier’s Global Open Call for Art.

Ultimately, all of these projects address the shared experience of quarantine. That’s exactly what the haiku project wants to capture.

Nakagawa trained as a drummer and appreciates “the pocket,” or the space between beats, which is why he loves haikus.

“Haikus are amazing that way in that it just invites your experiences to fill in the blanks and the empty space.”

“Haikus are amazing that way in that it just invites your experiences to fill in the blanks and the empty space,” he said. 

People often turn to art to document and make sense of hard times. And our collective quarantine has been unavoidably digital. It’s no wonder that we’re turning to the internet and art to make sense of and document this unprecedented moment in world history.