University of St. Thomas professors Dr. Heather Shirey (Professor of Art History) and Dr. Todd Lawrence (Associate Professor of English) spoke to the Library of Congress Blogs about their COVID-19 street art archive they started in 2020 as a part of their greater Urban Mapping research project they launched in 2018.
The two discussed how the project started:
"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," Lawrence said about the St. Paul area called Midway, which is the neighborhood where he lives.
This particular street art became especially popular during and immediately after the pandemic, when community members were once again filling the streets with the expression that had been suppressed during quarantine. "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," said Shirey, who had just started sabbatical when the pandemic lockdowns began. She begin making a spreadsheet of the art she saw from social posts, and the project expanded when she returned to the classroom.
"So, it started with students just finding images on social media and then building an archive from there," she said. "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."
Art has a way of documenting historical periods in a way that is active and real. Urban mapping is the idea that a community can be connected through audiovisual documentation such as landmarks or murals on walls throughout the city.
