Episode 17: “Shelter-in-Art”: A Creative Memorialization of the Pandemic

Posted Date: February 19, 2021

Episode Description: In this episode, LAC members Merve Tabur and K’Lah Rose Yamada interview Dr. Karen Keifer-Boyd, Michele Mekel, and Lauren Stetz from the Viral Imaginations: COVID-19 project. Viral Imaginations (#Penn State) is a collaborative art project that consists of an online gallery that aims to curate current and former Pennsylvanians’ creative engagements with the pandemic. The Viral Imaginations team discusses the significance of artistic expression and storytelling in the face of ecological destruction, racial injustice, and public health crises. The team also introduces the publicly available lesson plans (K-12) that incorporate submissions from the Viral Imaginations project into classroom discussions.

Guest Biographies

Michele Mekel is the assistant director of Penn State’s intercollege Bioethics Program (bioethics.psu.edu).  In addition, she is an assistant teaching professor of bioethics, affiliate faculty with Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institute and Penn State Law, and jointly appointed to the Humanities Department of Penn State’s College of Medicine.  Additionally, she serves as co-principal investigator of Viral Imaginations: COVID-19 (viralimaginations.psu.edu).  Her substantive areas of expertise and interest include: bioethics, law, health care, and health humanities.  Advocationally, she is a poet and a creatrix.  Her poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, among numerous other venues.

Karen Keifer-Boyd, Ph.D., Professor of Art Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, co-authored several books: Including Difference (NAEA, 2013); InCITE, InSIGHT, InSITE (NAEA, 2008); Engaging Visual Culture (Davis, 2007); co-edited Real-World Readings in Art Education: Things Your Professors Never Told You (Falmer, 2000); and has numerous journal publications. Her research on transdisciplinary creativity, inclusion, feminist art pedagogy, visual culture, cyberart activism, transcultural dialogue, action research, and eco-social justice art education has been translated and published in Austria, Brazil, China, Columbia, Finland, Oman, and S. Korea. Co-founder and editor of Visual Culture & Gender, she has received Fulbright Awards (2012 Distinguished Chair in Gender Studies at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria; and Finland, 2006) and residencies (Austria, 2009; Uganda, 2010); and several National Art Education Association (NAEA) awards including the Eisner Lifetime Achievement Award and the NAEA Distinguished Fellow Class of 2013.

Lauren Stetz is a Ph.D. candidate in Art Education with a minor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She holds a Master’s degree in Art History from George Mason University, specializing in Latin American Art. An experienced art educator, Lauren has taught in both public and private schools and colleges throughout Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington, DC for 13 years. She has worked with racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse populations of students from pre-k to college level, though she is currently a COVID-19 homeschool mom to her 2nd grade daughter. Lauren’s research interests include data visualization and transnational feminist cartography, fusing art and activism for empowerment, resistance, and pedagogy.

Project Description:

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Screenshot of the Viral Imaginations Visual Art Gallery.

Organized as an intersectional project involving the fields of arts, health humanities, and bioethics, the Viral Imaginations: COVID-19 project went live in April 2020 in the midst of the shelter-in-place phase of the coronavirus pandemic. A collaboration among the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture, the Bioethics Program, the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, the College of the Liberal Arts, and the College Medicine, Viral Imaginations is an ongoing, web-based gallery and archive that curates and preserves current and former Pennsylvanians’ imaginative and creative reflections on living in pandemic times.

The media plays a pivotal role in shaping social realities, bombarding individuals in both enlightening and disorienting ways. Viral Imaginations serves as a collaborative storytelling platform, offering an outlet for authentic lived experiences, personal narratives, critical awareness, and expanded empathy in a time of local, national, and global trauma and turmoil.

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Screenshot of the Viral Imaginations Creative Writing Gallery.

In an era of uncertainty with multiple crises related to the health, systematic racial injustice, the environment, and the economy, the arts are ever more necessary to human wellbeing.  The arts provide sensory ways of knowing and effect our emotions, attitudes, decisions, and behaviors.  In asking “why is imagination important,” Viral Imaginations enables examination of the narratives of those who have sheltered-in-art. Through visual and textual analysis, we identify emergent themes in the Viral Imaginations gallery across the pandemic’s trajectory and consider how these creative responses offer insights into the needs, hopes, and desires of living during a global pandemic.

Artwork & Poetry Highlights from Viral Imaginations:

Connect with Viral Imaginations: