As we approach the three-year anniversary of lockdown in New York, Commemorating COVID addresses the trauma of bereaved families. Over one million people have lost their lives to COVID, leaving 40% of Americans in mourning. As people and as artists, we hold space for the heartbreak of this pandemic. Our exhibit features five COVID memorials, which recognize and represent grief in different ways.

Historically, the United States has neglected the public memory of pandemics. Almost no memorials commemorate those who died of diseases like Smallpox, Yellow Fever, Cholera, or the 1918 Influenza. Our exhibit refuses this pattern of neglect, erasure, and forgetting, pushing back against societal pressures to “move on” from COVID without making space for public grief and healing.

Commemorating COVID also highlights the challenge of navigating private bereavement in the midst of public mourning. Losing someone to COVID means processing the sudden death of a loved one while reckoning with the broader implications of the pandemic. This can make the experience of mourning feel at once too public and too isolated, especially when communities have been deprived of funerals, memorial services, and other traditions that normally help make loss bearable. Commemorating COVID speaks to the experience of individuals whose private loss feels so public, and of communities working to grieve together in the midst of an ongoing crisis.