my visual diary of digital collages created during the initial covid-19 pandemic lockdown in Brooklyn, NY from March 2020 through November 2020…
…a short backstory…
…in the summer of 2019 I found out that ConArtist Collective, the artist collective/gallery I was part of and where I was showing my work was closing…
…I also found out that in January of 2020 my 9-5 job, which provided me with a great studio in Manhattan to do my own work in, was merging with another company and moving to Queens.
In a six month span I lost my studio and a gallery.
When my job moved from Manhattan to Queens, my commute from Brooklyn doubled to just over an hour each way…if I was lucky
I couldn’t do the work I usually did on a moving train. I needed to figure out a different way to work…
Knowing this was coming I got an iPad so I could work on my art on the train.
…I was barely able to get used to my new work/art/life routine before the pandemic hit NYC in March 2020.
Things got surreal…
…everything seemed to shut down and clear out fast…and then lockdown. The first couple of months the lockdown is where The Public Domain project was born.
Our neighborhood in Brooklyn was hit real hard. The sound of traffic and life outside was replaced by birds and the almost constant ambulance sirens. Unable to concentrate on my artwork, I started scrolling through the digital collections of different museums.
I found out that the NYPL, The Met and the Smithsonian, among others, had recently digitized portions of their collections and then put them in the public domain…goldmine! My pandemic daily routine started to form.
In the morning I would sit at my kitchen table, listening to the birds and sirens, and mine those public domain collections for images to use in that days collage. The only rules I set for the collages was that all the source images I used were in the public domain.
Also, I wanted to experiment with using text, something I had not done before, so I decided to include the text “Public Domain” as a faux brandname in each piece.
