HEATHER D. SCHULTE AS PART OF THE CREATIVE NEIGHBORHOODS: COVID-19 WORK PROJECTS, Heather D. Schulte is stitching representations of every confirmed COVID-19 case and death.
A guarantee of sanity
A fund for artists helps all of Boulder build resilience during crisis
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by Caitlin Rockett uring the early years of the AIDS epidemic in America, with Ronald Reagan conspicuously devoid of public thoughts on the matter, art began to fill the
silence. There was the “Silence = Death” graphic, its pink triangle a nod to the symbol gays were forced to wear in Nazi concentration camps. The graphic became emblematic of the crisis (both the viral crisis and the manufactured morality crisis that kept conservative leadership from addressing the virus). Then there was David Wojnarowicz, the multi-hyphenate artist and activist whose black-and-white portrait with sutured lips, blood trickling down his chin, gave grave
BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
physicality to the concept of deadly silence. Derek Jarman took a life-focused approach. After the filmmaker was diagnosed HIV positive in 1986, he began planting a vibrant garden at his blustery home by the sea in Kent, recording the process — along with stories from his life — for the memoir Modern Nature. The garden lives on today, more than a quarter century after Jarman’s death in 1994. The silence from the top is different today. Trump discusses this virus (though he failed to do so for more than a month when it surfaced), but refuses to address the tens of thousands of confirmed deaths (more than 80,000 at the time of writing) stemming from COVID-19. And I
again, art will fill the deadly silence. Art will also fill the space between us, bridging the physical chasms we’ve created to stop the virus from spreading. That’s the goal of a new fund for Boulderbased artists, The Creative Neighborhoods: COVID-19 Work Projects. With funding from the City of Boulder and nonprofit organization Create Boulder, the fund is designed to support artistic work that reinforces the “social infrastructure” of our community. Mandy Vink, administrator for public art at the City of Boulder’s Office of Arts and Culture, says the idea was based on Works Progress Administration, or WPA, projects of the New Deal era that helped the unemployed get back to work quickly on projects that benefited an entire society drained by the Great Depression. (Boulder High School was a WPA project, as were many of the trails and lodges on Flagstaff Mountain.) With Creative Neighborhoods, the artists create works that engage their neighborhoods — from a distance, of course — whether that MAY 14, 2020
neighborhood is a physical block of houses on a street or a community of people within the broader Boulder population. The fund, which topped out at $40,000, provided $599 to 66 artists, an amount that placed “no additional paperwork, no taxation, no extra burdens” on the artist, Vink says. The scope of the work is varied, from textile projects that document the number of confirmed COVID cases and deaths, to oral histories about how the pandemic has impacted Boulder’s black community, to graphic novels, to geocaching for seed packets. But each project has resilience built into its DNA, the notion that we’re in this together, even if we can’t be together. While the art museums may still be closed, art is always open. Art therapist Cathy Malchiodi wrote for Psychology Today, that for her, the “true purpose of art is one of resilience, not of pathology or mental illness.” “It is why humankind has continually see RESILIENCE Page 20
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