In this COVID Recollections post, we continue to commemorate the 5th anniversary of COVID-19 being declared a pandemic by highlighting the COVID-19 Street Art Archive—an online, archival collection of street art related to the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 Street Art is included in the American Folklife Center’s research guide on COVID-19 collections. The research guide is part of the American Folklife Center’s COVID-19 American History Project—an initiative to collect Americans’ COVID-19 stories and to archive them in the Library of Congress.
Below is an interview with Dr. Heather Shirey (Professor of Art History, University of St. Thomas) and Dr. Todd Lawrence (Associate Professor of English, University of St. Thomas), who created the COVID-19 Street Art Archive. This archive is part of Shirey and Lawrence’s broader project titled, Urban Art Mapping. Shirey and Lawrence are based in St. Paul, Minnesota.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Doug Peach: What is the COVID-19 Street Art Archive? How did the archive come about? What’s the connection of this archive to your broader project, Urban Art Mapping?
Heather Shirey: We should start by explaining Urban Art Mapping.
Todd Lawrence: Urban Art Mapping is a research team at the University of St. Thomas that we started back in 2018. We originally started with internal funding from our university and created a proposal to map, document, and archive images of street art in the Twin Cities. We started our work in a neighborhood of St. Paul called Midway, which is the neighborhood where I live. Midway happened to be a neighborhood where there was a lot of muraling and street art of various kinds. Midway is a pretty busy transit corridor for the two cities—between the two downtowns of St. Paul and Minneapolis, and from the central city out to the suburbs. A lot of people pass through Midway. We sent groups of students into the neighborhood to document street art as they found it—big pieces that were along the main streets, as well as graffiti and stickers and other kinds of street art in the neighborhood. We were interested in thinking about where street art is located, what location can tell us about how people engage with street art, and how street art can have different meanings, depending on where it’s located.
We started to see some messages and ideas that were coming out of the street art. We began thinking about ways that the street art was responding to the social and economic pressures of the neighborhood, which had previously been a white working-class neighborhood, but was in transition to a much more diverse immigrant neighborhood. Midway also had a light rail that goes through the south end of the neighborhood, which had a pretty big impact on it. Then, a soccer stadium was built just south of the neighborhood, technically not in Midway, but it’s on the border. These things have really affected the character of the neighborhood. Gentrification was starting to become an issue. So, we were trying to see how street art connected with these things. That was the beginning of Urban Art Mapping.
We were working on that project for a couple of years, then COVID came and that really shut us down. That gets us to the COVID-19 street art archive. But also, I think even more importantly, that same spring, early summer, of 2020, George Floyd was murdered in our city. And that’s what really set us on the project – it turned the project towards the George Floyd and anti-racist street art database. [Editor’s note: the George Floyd and anti-racist street art database is a separate archive, created through the Urban Art Mapping project.]
Heather Shirey: Urban Art Mapping, from 2018 to 2020, was all about being in the community. Students were always out with us in the community. We were doing everything together. We were talking to people, doing interviews all the time. We’d set up a booth, for example, at a community art festival and interview people. All of that was not possible anymore, starting in the spring of 2020. We received an email from the university that we weren’t allowed to meet in person with our students anymore and we weren’t allowed to have them meet with the community. So, the whole project changed as a result of the pandemic.
The semester [when] the pandemic [began], I was actually on sabbatical. I had the plan of expanding the existing project on street art and gentrification. I was going to travel to some other cities to do a comparative study. Then my flights got canceled. I thought, “Oh, it’s not possible to travel to this place anymore.” And yet I had a sabbatical, the goal and, really, the obligation to do my research. But I’m sitting at home. I remember just feeling a little bit lost about how I was going to make my project work and make my sabbatical productive.
I was looking at Instagram and I started seeing all these images of graffiti and street art from around the world about the pandemic. I remember seeing these articles that were coming up in in the news and popular media about, oh, you know, the 10 most beautiful murals in Los Angeles or murals in London about the pandemic. I remember we started to see all this stuff happening really quickly. We said, “Okay, this is going to be really fleeting. This is going to disappear really quickly or it’s going to change.”
We could even see how the character of the graffiti and street art in cities like Milan, Rome, or Paris, was different than the character of the street art in, let’s say, Los Angeles. Their experience of the pandemic was really different in those locations, right? It seemed worthwhile to look at those differences in a systematic way. I didn’t have any experience as an archivist, but I had time. So, I just started to make a spreadsheet. And then by the end of the day, I had 100 things in my spreadsheet. I realized that this was too big for just a spreadsheet, as much as I love a spreadsheet. I wanted to find another way for us to archive this information. So that’s how we got started with the project.
Doug Peach: How did you find items to include in this online archive?
Heather Shirey: With another colleague, I designed a class project where students looked on social media, with the understanding that what they might be seeing is different than what I’m seeing because that’s how social media works. We wanted students to start thinking about what they were seeing, how they were understanding the pandemic, and how they were able to connect the world outside of their very small little bubble of their home or wherever they were working at that time—sometimes their dorm room. [I wanted them to] see how people around the world were understanding the pandemic by way of looking at street art and graffiti.
So, it started with students just finding images on social media and then building an archive from there. It really was a classroom project in the very beginning. Then, we introduced the idea of crowdsourcing. I think that happened because somebody heard about the project who was living in Vancouver and just started sending me pictures. So, we started crowdsourcing and using our own social media to spread the word about the archive and asking people to submit images to us. People from around the world started sending us images that we included into the archive. And it really just grew from there. The next spring, I taught a class on the history of street art. So, I had students continue to do some of this research and engage with the archive for a couple of semesters.
One thing that we also found regarding crowdsourcing is that we connected with some people who were walking so much during the pandemic. There was a woman who was walking every day in New York City and just taking tons of pictures and sending them to us. Then there was another walker and documenter in the Twin Cities. These were not professional documentarians. They were just out walking and it felt to them like it was important to document the things that they saw. like They recognized that the things they were seeing on walls and on the pavement were significant to the experience that we were all having collectively at that time.
Todd Lawrence: Some of the documentarians saw their work as a kind of activism, right? There were a lot of people in the streets and various public-facing activism. But there were also people who didn’t feel safe in large groups at that time. Walking by yourself through an empty city, documenting things, I think, seemed for some people, like something they could do to contribute.
Doug Peach: Are you continuing to see items submitted through crowdsourcing or your students, or has that tapered off as we’ve moved from 2022 or 2023 to today?
Heather Shirey: It has definitely tapered off. About 2022 or 2023, [the pandemic] didn’t feel relevant to students anymore. The students started saying that they felt like the pandemic was so long ago and they weren’t really that engaged with it. They didn’t really want to talk about the pandemic that much. Now, sometimes images still trickle in. Somebody will send a picture or we’ll see something, but we haven’t really been getting images through crowdsourcing. Maybe that will um be reinvigorated with the five year anniversary of COVID.
Doug Peach: You briefly mentioned that, in May 2020, right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. Can you talk about the relationship between your COVID-19 street art work and Floyd’s death?
Todd Lawrence: The uprising and the civil and civic issues after the murder of George Floyd became really connected to the pandemic itself. A lot of people started to document for racial justice and over-policing. [I remember] pieces that connected COVID with the with violence and over-policing. I can think of a particular piece that’s in the archive where it’s just some writing underneath a bridge that said, “cops equal COVID,” for example. We are talking about the two pandemics, right? COVID and racial injustice as another kind of pandemic. So that was what really tied those things together.
It was such a surreal time. For us, as researchers, it was crazy because COVID was happening and things were happening in the world that we had never seen before, we’d never experienced before. Shutting down a university for a semester?! Teaching everybody completely online?! It was so far removed from anything we’d ever experienced before. Then, you’re thinking, “well what else could possibly happen?” And then George Floyd is murdered. During the pandemic, people rushed out into the streets to protest. They were risking their lives to stand up and share their expressions around an issue that they cared passionately about, you know? So, it was a dangerous and risky time. It was a time when people were holding to their beliefs, to their core ethics. They were willing to risk their lives to talk in public about things they thought needed to be changed. A lot of the art captures that.
It was also a time when people were separated from each other but were trying to find ways to connect with each other. Even the seemingly solitary act of like someone walking the streets of an abandoned city and art going up on walls became, I think we can say, an effort to connect with other people. Writers and artists don’t create art in a vacuum. It’s about communication. It’s about speaking to other people and engaging in discourse. That was a big part of what was going on at the time, part of that effort to connect with other people.
Heather Shirey: It’s fair to say that the uprising took the form it did in some ways because of the pandemic. People were eager to be together, to get out in the streets. People were under stay-at-home orders in lots of cities. So, this was an important opportunity to come out and connect with people and stand up for what really mattered.
But, also in terms of the art, the plywood was already up in lots of cities during the pandemic before the uprising [Editor’s note: plywood was used by many businesses during the pandemic to cover their windows and doors when they were forced to close, presumably to protect from looting]. The plywood was already forming miles of canvas in cities where artists could paint. The idea of using the streets as a place for discourse, it was happening already during the pandemic. Then, I think it accelerated during the uprising. We’ve talked to lots of artists who were working during the uprising. They talked about how, during the pandemic, you could be outside. You could be painting. Often artists wear a mask when they’re painting with spray paint anyway. So, it was comfortable to wear a mask. It was easy to social distance and paint. It was easy to have conversations with people and maintain social distancing when you were painting.
Doug Peach: What were some of the entries into the COVID-19 street art archive that that stood out to you and why?
Todd Lawrence: I want to talk about two pieces. One is a piece by the artist LMNOP. It’s a really beautiful portrait of a Black nurse with a mask on. The text says, “protect nurses.” I was always really struck by that piece, it’s really beautiful. It reminded me of that effort to thank and appreciate people who were on the front lines—like healthcare care workers and caregivers. You’ll remember in big cities, like New York and London, at seven o’clock at night, people would come to their windows and clap in in appreciation for frontline workers and especially healthcare workers.
I think healthcare workers experienced this extraordinarily traumatic period when they were just trying to save people’s lives. They were working super long hours. They were losing their colleagues. Some of that is forgotten, I think. That mural really reminds me of that time. It’s one of the pieces that we have in the database that recognizes the sacrifices and contributions of those frontline workers.
Then, the other is one I would see when I was riding my bike in the city near Lexington Avenue in St. Paul. I saw this “COVID is a scam,” scrawled on the wall. It was there for a while, then it got buffed. Then, the person came back and put something else up – there are two different versions of it and we have a picture of both in the archive. It just reminds me of like riding through an emptied city and, when you saw someone on the street, you assessed the situation. Do they have a mask on? Should I move to provide space for them? You know, thinking about how do you even interact with people in public space? So this piece of street art brings that all back to me – that kind of hyper awareness of yourself in public space. Even though I disagree with what the piece said, it really brings me back emotionally to that time and what it felt like to be living in that world in a way I’d never lived in before.
Heather Shirey: I’d say that, before talking about a specific piece, I think it’s important to know that we organize the archive by large categories, or themes, that we saw. COVID denial was something we saw. Gratitude to essential workers was a major category. Things like hope and community. There were didactic images that informed people about washing your hands and wearing a face mask. There were images about new social norms with people grappling with what society was like now and where were we. There were political critiques. Then, there was this huge category of popular cultural references. I mean, that was always fun to see. I think those were some of the first images that really caught my eye.
One thing that I liked about documenting the pandemic is that I never expected, as an art historian, that art about toilet paper would become such a major theme that I was investigating. But, around the world, there was so much street art and graffiti about toilet paper and about hoarding toilet paper. There is one by this LA artist. It is like a stencil of a person with a trench coat and opening up their trench coat with rolls of toilet paper inside. I just thought that was so funny.
There is an artist working in the Bay Area, who goes by the name Velvet Bandit, who we interviewed. The Velvet Bandit is an artist who, before the pandemic, had worked in the lunchroom in the cafeteria of a school and then had stay-at-home orders during the pandemic. The artist turned to the streets during the pandemic and started making these really fun, interesting, and sometimes biting wheatpastes and putting them up around the Bay Area. I really like some of those.
Another of the Velvet Bandit’s pieces is called Virus Corn Popper. It’s like one of those corn popper toys that little kids have, that you push along and it’s got the little balls that pop around. Do you know what I’m talking about? That was one of my favorite toys when I was a kid. Maybe that’s why I like this piece. Inside are little COVID viruses. The idea that we could envision this virus and then turn it into an artistic form and everybody could recognize it, that really fascinated me. I really liked that piece because it was fun and playful and it said, “roll with it.” It was kind of fun about resistance and resilience during that time.
I also really liked the work of an artist named Assil Diab, who is currently based in Richmond, Virginia, I think, but whose origins [were] in Sudan. And during the pandemic, she went back to Khartoum and she was painting works in Sudan, where there were really no women who were doing street art. She was painting some very political images addressing the pandemic. She was really putting herself in a dangerous situation by working in the streets, addressing political issues through street art, and tying them together with COVID. She did this really powerful piece where she was looking at the first medics who were from Sudan, who were working in Great Britain, who had died from the pandemic. I thought that was a really powerful tribute.
Doug Peach: I’d like to know more about documenting street art, particularly during public health crises. What does researching this medium provide for you as researchers, that may be unique when compared to other mediums of expression?
Todd Lawrence: From the very beginning of this project, we have learned that street art is a really unique artistic expression, particularly in times of crisis. With both COVID and with George Floyd, we saw that people went into the streets and felt like they could, through street art, express these sometimes very radical political positions and they could do it in ways that could multiply the message. If you think of a sticker, for example, you, in the safety of your home, can make 50 or 100 stickers and then you can head out into the streets and very easily put that message up in 100 different locations in the city. Now, it looks like you know there’s 100 people who think this thing, right?
One person can multiply their voice a huge way. Artists think about the ways their message can be expressed to people in different areas. So, we think a lot about where street art is located. [If] a piece was, it was by a hospital, if it was by a school, if it was by a church, et cetera, you know might add emphasis to a particular message.
We thought of [street art’s] power also as vernacular expression, right? Like, as coming, from people, from groups of people expressing the point of view of marginalized people with non-institutionalized messages. This is what people were really thinking and what people felt they should take the risk to express in public places.
Heather Shirey: [Street art] changed really, really quickly [during the pandemic]. You know, the messages would change, new information would become available. The crisis would hit differently in different cities. We would see those messages playing out in different ways in different locations. Sometimes, things that were really informal to begin with, became somewhat institutionalized. At the top of our of our archive’s [online presence], there’s an image of this wall with all these hearts on it. It’s in London. It’s a National COVID Memorial Wall in London now, but it started out informally with people just painting hearts and then writing the names of people that they knew and loved who had died of COVID. It’s this huge, long wall now and it’s become The National COVID Memorial Wall. So, it became something of an institution over the course of time. I think those kinds of pieces are important too, because the names of all of these people that are written on the wall, they’re not recorded in any other way. Maybe there’s not even an official record of all those people who died of COVID, right? I think it’s really important to know that and to document that.
Doug Peach: The street art that we’ve been talking about is, by nature, temporary. Meaning, there is a finite time that it is available for the public to see, before it is erased, removed, or painted over. Yet, the process of archiving, by nature, is to preserve something for a longer period of time. How have you navigated this tension of time, between street art being something that’s a temporary form of expression and then your efforts to make that expression viewable for a longer period, through your archive?
Todd Lawrence: It’s a complicated question. It’s a question we get asked a lot when we’re talking about any of our archives and our work. We cannot deny that really the impetus for creating these archives was because of our thinking, “This stuff is going to go away. People are going to forget that this was here.” The nature of street art is that it gets painted over, it gets buffed by business owners, the police, and the city workers. So many people think of certain kinds of street art, graffiti, stickers, and things like that, as being unattractive, as being an indicator of a bad neighborhood or a neighborhood-in-decline—that sort of thing. So, we saw this is as an important moment. What people are saying in the streets is important. We adopted our motto that “walls speak and people need to listen.”
[One way] we thought that we could contribute would be to document and archive these pieces as much as we could. We knew we couldn’t do it by ourselves. That’s when we decided that we needed to reach out to other people, we needed to start crowdsourcing. The COVID project [began] as informal. Eventually when we got to doing the George Floyd archive, we tried to make that more systematic, asking people to help us and getting contributions that way. Somebody gave us 6,000 images of the of the Black Lives Matter memorial fence in DC, so things like that.
On the other hand, [we’ve asked] a lot of artists, “How do you feel about your piece degrading and eventually becoming unseeable?” They’re like, “Yeah, it’s supposed to be like that. That’s the way it works. That’s street art, it goes away with time.” In some ways we’re working against the desires or the intention of some of the artists. The thing that keeps us doing it, and makes us feel okay, is the response that we’ve gotten from artists, whose art we have archived, who have been super thankful and have basically said, “This is great. We’re glad that you’re documenting this—not because of the art itself, but because of what we were trying to do in that moment.”
What we’re archiving is not so much [the] actual pieces of art, but expressions, ideas, and experiences that come through the art. I don’t really have a problem with us doing this because that’s really what we’re trying to get at. What were people thinking? What were people willing to do? How are they being impacted by this thing that was going on? It all comes through the art.
Heather Shirey: Sometimes artists express to us that they feel like the art continues to do the work it was intended to do by existing in the archive. The conversations are still happening. The art can still make that happen because it still exists in digital form. I think that can be pretty powerful.
It’s funny to look back on it and think about five years ago. I don’t think I could picture a post-pandemic world. I couldn’t picture how this archive would be used today. It was very much in the moment – just trying to understand what was happening around us.
Todd Lawrence: Another part of Urban Art Mapping, is that we document Black Lives Matter street murals. We go to different cities and interview people who did those grand scale murals that took a lot of time. They often say to us, “We saw what other people were doing and we thought, what could we do?” And we decided to do this here in our community. When I think about it, that’s basically what we were thinking. We’re academics. We’re like, what resources do we have access to? What could we do?
We knew we had a street art project. We knew about street art. We could learn how to archive. We thought, “let’s try to preserve this stuff.” That’s what we could do. That was our contribution. Then, it became like a community contribution because everybody else was contributing to the archive, too. Archives [are] not like static things, not basement closets where we put the stuff that we’ve collected, but they’re living. They’re still engaging the art. The messages are still speaking to people. People, we hope, are visiting those archives, using them in classrooms, using them for various purposes, [and for] research. That keeps them alive. That makes them a form of activism that makes them contribute to the ongoing life of people around the world. That’s a really important aspect of the work we’re doing.
Doug Peach: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
Todd Lawrence: I would love to express our appreciation to the people who created this art. From stickers, graffiti, a tag, to murals – all of it is valuable, all of it is important. We want to pay attention and we want to make sure that people can engage with it. We appreciate that people went out and did this. We wouldn’t have these archives if people hadn’t made the art, if people hadn’t risked their lives—some climbing high surfaces and all the things that that street artists do that’s risky—and [some] risked being arrested. I have a lot of appreciation for the people who do this kind of art in the streets. It’s important. It often gets neglected or overlooked or misinterpreted. To me, and I think to everybody on our team, we think it’s amazing. We thank the people who created it.
Doug Peach: And, I want to thank you, Dr. Shirey and Dr. Lawrence, for the work you have done to create this important archive. I appreciate you speaking with me, as part of the COVID-19 American History Project.