One image in the collection shows the sculpted presidents of Mount Rushmore masked up. Another is a replica of Botticelli’s Venus with a mask-shaped tan line. These are works in the Covid Art Museum, which is documenting a year of the coronavirus pandemic through the eyes of artists. With over 800 exhibits, the museum touches on the different phases of the global emergency, from the uncertainty of the first wave of lockdowns to the hope provided by vaccination campaigns around the world. 

Art Under Lockdown

The CAM Covid Art Museum is a novel online institution. It is dedicated to all the creative projects developed during the period of the global pandemic. The project was the idea of three young Spaniards, José Guerrero, Emma Calvo and Irene Llorca. Seeing that their friends were using art as an “escape from confinement” during the first lockdown, they started a Covid art Instagram page. Here, the three founders also began to collect material from other users of the social media platform. Soon, the trio decided to formalize the project. They now have a stylish website dubbed “the world’s first museum for art born during Covid-19 quarantine”. Since March last year, they have been publishing what they call “quarantine art” or “covid art” on the website daily. 

Documenting the Crisis

The works included in the Covid Art Museum range from amusing meme-like images to surreal and abstract artworks. The works touch on almost all the experiences and emotions of the pandemic period. One image lists the days of the week, but everything has been scribbled out but the last part — “day” — of each word, reminding us of the monotony of lockdowns. A mesmerizing photo shows a street filled with oddly spaced-out pedestrians, in reference to social distancing. As the museum posted on Instagram, the artist behind the work explained, “During lockdown, I started reworking my long-term street photography project Selected People to fit the current climate of isolation. Going back through my archives, I made new work that reimagines the world as a more attenuated and somber place.”

In time for the Olympics, the museum posted a photo of swimmers lined up at the side of a pool represented by a giant light blue mask. The vaccine campaign, instead, saw an image of the Monalisa receiving her jab. There are Edward Hopper-like works that touch on the loneliness and isolation of lockdowns, and a harrowing photo of a morgue worker squeezing into an apartment elevator with a coffin.  

Supporting Creativity During the Pandemic

In a press statement, the Covid Art Museum founders said, “In the future we will have data on those affected by Covid19, and economic figures on what happened, but it is also very interesting to have this museum to know how people expressed themselves, how they lived it and felt it. We would like it to serve as an archive.” In fact, the museum now gets hundreds of submissions daily. The curators review submitted works and publish “those that best reflect the current moment”. 

As well as aiming to preserve the pandemic-inspired creative endeavors, the museum hopes to aid creators too. “Everything points to the fact that after this health crisis another economic one will come,” they said in the press statement. “It is important that among professionals in the art and creativity sector we support each other and give ourselves visibility.”

Meanwhile, some traditional galleries elsewhere in the world have assembled pandemic-themed artwork. One of them is Portraits of Resilience by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Canada, which received more than 3,000 digital submissions from photographs to sculptures from around the world. A curated collection will be shown next spring, says the gallery.

Featured image: The joy of crossing paths with strangers by @mokshini