How the pandemic is creating new opportunities for art
A typical Monday turns my leafy suburban street into a shortcut to the highway. Waze sends commuters zipping by to shave a few minutes off their commutes. But since our city began sheltering in place, there has been a different kind of bustle. Now there’s a constant stream of older couples wearing masks, dogs tugging their owners along on leashes, and kids learning to balance on bicycles, all soaking up a few minutes of sunshine before they go back to the confines of their living rooms.
With fewer cars on the road and a whole new semi-captive audience, our street has become the perfect space for my kids to create. Last Sunday afternoon, they wore an entire bucket of chalk down to the nubs, making an elaborate mural of geometric shapes, cartoon dragons, and messages for the neighbors. Our street isn’t the only one that has become a blank canvas. Chalk art in the streets has become something of a phenomenon across the country lately.
Art has always played an important role in society, helping humans relate to and interpret the world around them. In the midst of a global pandemic, that role seemed more important than ever, so Creative Collisions dug in to uncover emerging trends.
The Creative Collisions group came together at the beginning of the pandemic. For a few minutes every morning, we step out of our daily lives as designers, consultants, and researchers to share what is inspiring us. The pattens that emerged as we explored art in the age of coronavirus illustrate just how significant the role of art has been during this period of upheaval.
Pattern 1 | Art is emerging in new spaces
Our chalk-saturated sidewalks aren’t the only fresh canvases emerging. Boarded up storefronts, lining once vibrant shopping districts, have become a new playground for artists to inspire and uplift their communities. In Seattle, vibrant colors and bold lettering bring messages of hope. In San Francisco, Paint the Void is creating a public gallery by matching businesses with visual artists to bring life back to desolate, plywood-lined streets.
Even trash cans are becoming a vessel for art these days. Designer Lewis Miller re-imagined New York City trash cans as vases for his elaborate floral arrangements and strategically placed the larger than life bouquets around Manhattan to brighten the day of frontline workers. This “flower flash” concept has traveled as far as Florida and Wisconsin, where florists are turning the collapse in demand for their flowers into something beautiful.
The Creative Collisions group found that art is filling many of the empty spaces created by the pandemic with messages of hope and resilience. It’s absorbing some of what we’ve lost and is giving us a gift in return, creating little moments of asynchronous connection and optimism to help us keep going.
To lean into this trend here are some questions to explore…
- What can we each do with art to help others be more resilient?
- How can communities incentivize acts of public good that benefit the well-being of all?
- How can businesses use art to inspire and encourage the customers they serve?
Pattern 2 | Everyone is invited and encouraged to create
Every day at lunch for three weeks in March, children’s book author and illustrator Mo Willems opened up his studio to doodle with anyone who wanted to join him online. My family took him up on the offer several times. He’d sketch quietly alongside us, offering inspiration and encouragement without pressure — it was just doodling after all. For a little while we could step away from the explosion of scattered puzzle pieces and neglected piles of clean laundry in our home and enter his spacious, bright studio with its beautifully bold drawers neatly lining the back wall. Sometimes we’d even get to peek into those drawers and be included in the magic of turning ideas into real books. Countless other artists are making similar offers right now, providing a window into their processes and inviting others to join them in creation.
Organizations that support the arts are welcoming public participation right now too. The Getty Museum invites anyone to recreate works from its collection using objects around the house. And then there’s the Met Gala challenge — replicate a past Met Gala red carpet look at home. If you’re curious how a simple vacuum cleaner can transform into an Ancient Greek statue or just how stunning a paper and tape gown can be, both are well worth a look.
As we considered these countless invitations, our Creative Collisions group noticed an interesting relationship. While barriers have gone up all around us (Stay home! Wear a mask! Keep 6 feet apart!), the barriers to create art seem to be falling. The public is being welcomed with open arms into a space that felt off limits before. And with these VIP backstage passes, we’re seeing that even the professionals need to go through multiple drafts, trying things out and making mistakes, before they arrive at the final product. Suddenly it’s OK to try and sketch like Mo Willems or to reinterpret a Vermeer. The goal isn’t a museum worthy piece, it’s to experience the joy of creation and to share that joy with others.
Mass participation in the arts could certainly be written off to the fact that a lot of people are stuck at home right now with extra time on their hands. But there’s more to it than that. Creative expression can be a powerful coping mechanism and an outlet for stress, and stress is something we have no shortage of right now.
To lean into this trend here are some questions to explore…
- As individuals, how can we maintain our creative curiosity even after the pandemic is over?
- What invitations could communities offer to encourage creativity?
- How can businesses connect with their customers on a more human level through participation?
Pattern 3 | Art is expressing the collective emotions of a shared experience
Early on in the pandemic, I often found myself caught up in a swirl of headlines, trying to keep pace with rapidly changing information. In one of those anxious moments, I discovered that the New York Times had asked 17 artists who were sheltering in place to capture the view from their windows to show what it feels like to live through this unique moment in history. An eerie image of the Empire State Building, glowing red to honor emergency workers stood out. It was accompanied by a quote from the artist, Ariel Davis: “The duality of support and positivity, with an undercurrent of anxiety, I think, speaks to how everyone is feeling right now.” It certainly spoke to what I was feeling in that moment, even if I couldn’t quite articulate it.
Similarly, photographer Adam Coppola’s image of a little girl, dressed as a doctor, looking at a reflection of herself as a superhero in a cape, distills the profound gratitude being collectively felt for front line workers right now.
Beyond expressing raw emotion, art is also providing a vehicle to help people internalize new behaviors. In India, a group of prominent folk artists joined together to create a series that conveys new COVID-19 norms using traditional folk art forms. By showing gods in face masks washing their hands, they are rooting these new behaviors firmly in tradition and are thereby normalizing them.
In many examples that surfaced during our exploration, our group noticed that artists were translating an intense moment in time into something more digestible. By expressing the deep emotions of this crisis through visual language, they were providing reassurance that no one is alone with those feelings.
To lean into this trend here are some questions to explore…
- How might visual communication help fortify new behaviors among those who have been resistant to change?
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Across all of these examples, art is connecting people at a time when we’re supposed to be physically distant, and the power to create those connections has moved outside of the realm of the professionals and into our own living rooms. Art is creating profound value for individuals and communities right now, filling in the physical and emotional gaps that COVID-19 has left.
When the history books record this pandemic, they’ll be full of statistics that reflect losses sustained and discoveries made. But the art that was created during this period will offer a different kind of record. It will become a visual reminder of what it felt like to sustain those losses and to hope for those discoveries.
In the week that followed the creation of our magical chalk walk, my kids eagerly pressed their noses to our front picture window anytime someone strolled by. Squeals of delight filled our living room with every neighbor who paused momentarily to share in their mural. When the chalk inevitably fades, the memory of my daughter sitting proudly on top of an acrostic poem of “NEIGHBORS” will forever represent this pandemic for me. A moment of pure joy in the midst of tremendous uncertainty.
This article is part of a series about the positive opportunities stemming from the pandemic. Please share and sign up here for our Curiosity Club if you’d like to receive regular updates.
Creative Collisions is a collective of designers, founded by Amy Bonsall and Kate Piper, focused on surfacing the beauty in the evolutions the coronavirus pandemic has created.
Special thanks to Creative Collisions teammates Adam Coppola, Tracy DeLuca, Bobby Hughes, Dan Soltzberg, and Silvia Vergani for their contributions to this exploration of art during the COVID-19 pandemic. Much appreciation to Corey Binns for sharing her writer’s wisdom.
