This book contains written reflections and photography by LaGuardia Community College (CUNY) students who documented their experiences during New York City’s first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Spring of 2020. Eight students in the Gardiner-Shenker Student Scholars Program had begun the semester with plans to engage with the Wagner and LaGuardia Archives to focus on 1980s New York but had to improvise quickly and ended up setting their sights very much on the current moment. While they used traditional practices of archive development and curating to create their new project, they went beyond collecting physical artifacts and ephemera to include the vulnerable, emotional aspects of their unique experiences as well. The moving portrayal helped the creators to process the present and serves as a valuable document of an unprecedented period that will be archived at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives and available for researchers and future students.
Category Archives: Physical Exhibits
New York Responds: The First Six Months
New York Responds: The First Six Months looks at the still-unfolding events of 2020 through the eyes of over 100 New Yorkers. This crowd-sourced exhibition presents objects, photographs, videos, and other artworks that document and interpret the COVID pandemic, the racial justice uprisings, and the responses of New Yorkers as they fought to cope, survive, and forge a better future. A jury of a dozen New Yorkers representing many walks of life helped to make the selection from among tens of thousands of submissions received from individual artists and from partner institutions.
Museum of the City of New York, December 18, 2020 through May 9, 2021