UGA to Z PANDEMIC POSTERS
CED Professor’s Art Promotes Awareness an
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Amitabh Verma MLA ’94, associate professor in the College of Environment and Design, has long advocated for the power of art and design to combat stress and anxiety. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Verma has turned his talents to a new kind of art: posters to promote shelter-in-place guidelines, mask wearing, and other safe practices. There is no shortage of public awareness campaigns from businesses, local governments, and health care agencies. But they’re not as efficient nor as compelling as they could be, relying heavily on text instead of images. Verma sought to change that. By injecting humor and emphasizing graphics over text, Verma’s gallery of posters encouraged healthy practices using well-known imagery like Rosie the Riveter, da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and Egyptian hieroglyphs to communicate a modern message with classic flavor.
HISTORICAL RECORD
Collecting COVID stories The COVID-19 pandemic will be a defining event that impacts generations to come. To help both current and future scholars understand this moment in time, University of Georgia Special Collections Libraries are collecting stories and digital reflections on how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the lives of Georgians in 2020. The collection will be a time capsule accessible to researchers, educators, and students at UGA and around the world, showcasing personal reflections, photos, poetry, recordings, and other media. The materials will provide context and personal stories of the positive and negative impact felt during this period, when schools transitioned to digital learning, families sheltered in place together, and people were forced to define essential services. “Our public university libraries and archives keep the record of who we are as a people. Documenting the current pandemic in real time is an essential task,” says Scott Nesbit, assistant professor of digital humanities in UGA’s College of Environment and Design. Students in the college’s historic preservation graduate program are currently creating informal archives with sources related both to today’s pandemic in their community and the pandemic of 1918.
shannah montgomery
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