Started by SVA’s head of archives, Beth Kleber, in the immediate aftermath of the College’s shift to remote operations in mid-March amidst the coronavirus pandemic, the collection is a mix of multidisciplinary works from SVA students, alumni and faculty created over months of self-isolation.

“As soon as academic institutions began shutting down in March, there was a lot of conversation in the archives community about documenting this period in time,” Kleber says. “The fact that our students make art offers a less invasive way to get at the SVA community's experience. I was hoping that art was providing a therapeutic filter for our students, faculty, and staff.” Kleber was proven right when she put out a request for submissions to a new archive collection via a Google Form, with the intention for a completely digital format. The process for submission is simple and accessible, and artists can still contribute, though anything 3D has to be photographed for inclusion. Paintings, sculptures, digital illustrations, videos and photographs from more than 175 contributors (and counting) have been added over the past few months.

These works are painful, uplifting, lived-in, politically charged, frightening, hopeful; they show the dark and the light, the silver linings and the solitude. They show people young and old, abled and disabled, alone and together. They show us at-home still lifes of meals cooked, candles burned, belongings arranged and rearranged, grocery orders, mock magazine covers and advertisements, pieces of propaganda and news media, unmade beds, imagined public service announcements and banal tasks.

Kleber noticed these themes, too. “I think one thing that stood out to me was the mundanity and boredom of being in self-isolation,” she says. “This experience has been traumatic for a lot of people and you can see that in the work, but also there was this permeating sense of isolation and tedium of being stuck inside, without the ability to connect in-person with friends and extended family.”

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