Creating Art During COVID

One of the biggest shifts we saw across all of our interviews is the space in which art is created. Throughout the interviews, we heard of painters having to relocate all of their art to their room, sculptors having to shift from Duke studios to their home driveways and thesis students who had planned much different projects finding solace in meditative drawings which are easily made while sitting on the floor of her living room. We also saw how music at Duke had first tried shifting digital, and then after failing, shifted to being rehearsed outside of the music building. The Nasher Museum of Art even installed a specifically outdoor exhibit, which eventually spread into outdoor spaces in Durham in order to account for COVID barring any visitors to the inside of the museum.

Jordan comments about the writing and performance of the Inside Joke comedy group’s progress over the past year: “even if we were excited about it, it’s really really hard to do this over zoom…. There’s so much body language, so much timing, there’s so much that gets lost over zoom.” Jordan notes that Inside Joke, and most comedy groups, have had an extremely difficult time adapting to COVID, as so much of comedy is dependent on in-person interactions and because of the lack of comedic inspiration the pandemic has brought. Jordan reflects that his personal projects have also been incredibly difficult to complete in the past year by the nature of how emotionally draining existing in a global pandemic has been.

Camille describes how concerts which previously took place at the campus CoffeeHouse are all online now. She explains how not having a physical space has really hurt the sense of community among the staff. Before the pandemic, the CoffeeHouse served as a campus hub for the arts where individuals could study, paint, attend concerts and find a community space for artistic thinking. Camille comments how converting the concerts to digital livestreams and shutting the space has eliminated most possibilities for building the same relationships between people within the arts community that the CoffeeHouse once brought to Duke’s campus.

All of those I interviewed expressed sentiments of missing museums, as a place of artistic inspiration and community. As a Gallery Guide at the Nasher Museum of Art who has participated in converting museum tours to digital powerpoints, I have seen how much of the discussion around and exposure to art has been reduced throughout COVID. While museums have done an excellant job of producing ways to consistently engage from an online platform, none of them come close to being in the physical space of a museum.