“A Big, Slow, Majestic Covid Memorial”

Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, nearly 1.2 million people across the country—including an estimated 83,000 in New York City—have lost their lives to the virus. Countless others continue to suffer from Long COVID. The mounting toll of death and diminished health has inflicted immeasurable pain but also brought communities together to provide support and comfort to those suffering the reverberating effects of the virus.

In memory of those impacted by the pandemic, NAMING THE LOST Memorials (NTLM), City Lore, Great Small Works, Mano a Mano, and The Green-Wood Cemetery are collaborating on a new memorial—A Big, Slow, Majestic Covid Memorial. On view from Friday, May 3rd through Friday, June 3rd, it will consist of tributes made by 22 community groups from across New York City.

A Big, Slow, Majestic Covid Memorial will hold a prominent place along Green-Wood’s historic wrought-iron fence, near the Main Entrance at Fifth Avenue at 25th Street. Packed tightly from top to bottom on the fence, it will stretch horizontally for 200 feet. During this time, the public is encouraged to create and add their own nameplates to the memorial. There will be a dedicated space on the memorial for public participation.

Contributors to the memorial, including community partners, artists, and activists, will come together at Green-Wood on Sunday, May 19th from 4:00–6:00pm for a dedication and activation ceremony at the Historic Chapel. The ceremony will bring together the NTLM team and community partners for an evening that will include a procession, second line, traditional singers, and a participatory ritual of remembrance. All are welcome to participate to commemorate those who died of COVID-19 and remember them together.

The activation ceremony will be livestreamed on City Lore’s YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/live/yb6JQGJsd9c?feature=share.

To learn more about the memorial, visit https://www.green-wood.com/naming-the-lost-a-big-slow-majestic-covid-memorial/.

Registration—which is optional—to attend the ceremony for free is at https://www.green-wood.com/event/naming-the-lost-memorials-activation-ceremony-2/. For access needs and COVID-19 harm reduction information, visit namingthelost.com/memorials.

The theme of this year’s memorial comes, with permission, from disability justice writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, who wrote in The Future is Disabled, “Everyone is holding so much grief right now, and it’s so hard, but it’s kind of created this bigger, slower, majestic space to be real with what’s going on and organize from that space.”

"NAMING THE LOST Memorials aims to create an annual, tangible wall of memory that does not allow the lives and souls of the many thousands of victims of the COVID-19 pandemic to escape our thoughts—thoughts which are needed to remember, grasp our losses, and find ways to create healthier and more compassionate communities," said Steve Zeitlin, Co-Director, City Lore.

“Green-Wood is proud to partner with NAMING THE LOST Memorials, City Lore, and all of our community partners to present this poignant memorial. We must always remember those whose lives have been forever changed by this pandemic, whether through the loss of loved ones or the ongoing healthcare needs of those who continue to suffer,” said Richard J. Moylan, President of Green-Wood.

To create this memorial, NAMING THE LOST Memorials has collaborated with 22 community groups from across the city whose constituents have suffered significant losses from COVID-19. The planning team includes: Juan Aguirre, director of Mano a Mano; Sandra A. M. Bell, artist and producer; Elena Martínez, folklorist and producer; Megan Paradis Hanley, theater artist and educator; Jenny Romaine, artist, organizer, and educator; and, Steve Zeitlin, City Lore co-director.

Community partners are: Bronx Documentary Center, Casa Yurumein, University Heights High School, Vishnu Mandir Hindu Temple, and BAAD/Health & Hip Hop, Inc. (all of the Bronx); Come Forever Mutual Aid & Health Resources Center, Guyana Cultural Association, Parent Child Relationship Association, Project Reach Youth, Purelements Evolution in Dance, The Bklyn Combine, West Indian American Day Carnival Association, and Women’s Empowerment Coalition of New York (all of Brooklyn); Yaffa Cultural Arts (Manhattan); Bangladesh Institute of Performing Arts, Jews of Jackson Heights, and Epicenter NYC (all of Queens); La Colmena (Staten Island); and Archive Based Creative Arts, Health Care Workshop, Long Covid Justice, and New Moon Sisters (all citywide organizations).

NAMING THE LOST Memorials is a small team of artists, activists, and folklorists that has been curating memorial sites in New York City to name and remember victims of the COVID-19 pandemic since May 2020. They created homegrown memorials in a public setting to draw attention to the astounding number of COVID deaths and to give people a place to name their lost loved ones. Over Memorial Day weekend that year, public memorial sites were created across the city, including one at Green-Wood. The 2023 memorial, “THE MANY LOSSES FROM COVID-19”, was on view last May.

NAMING THE LOST Memorials and City Lore will continue to help communities create COVID-19 memorials through 2025. As part of The Monuments Project, its nationwide initiative to rethink the meaning and creation of monuments, the Mellon Foundation provided a major grant to support this work. Selected artifacts of these ephemeral memorials will be archived at the New-York Historical Society for future exhibitions and research into the impact of the pandemic. Documentation of the memorials also will become part of an updated, interactive NAMING THE LOST Memorials website (namingthelost.com/memorials) where key elements will be translated into some of the many languages spoken by New Yorkers.

About NAMING THE LOST Memorials: Since May 2020, NAMING THE LOST Memorials (NTLM), a small team of volunteer artists, activists, and folklorists, has curated memorial sites in New York City to name and remember victims of the COVID-19 pandemic. The memorials consisted of tens of thousands of nameplates with personalized drawings and photos, created by the families and friends of those who have lost loved ones to the virus. With a grant from the Mellon Foundation, NTLM, in collaboration with City Lore, will continue its work from 2023-2025. Green-Wood will be home to new memorials each spring.

About City Lore: City Lore is New York’s center for urban folk culture. In the earliest days of the pandemic, City Lore launched Touching Hearts Not Hands a call for creative responses to the developing situation. From the moment the call went out in March 2022, this project took as its goal to document and preserve the folk culture that has developed in response to the COVID-19 epidemic, collecting hundreds of songs, poems, videos, images of signs from shop windows and other material. At around the same time, Martínez started to document and organize with NAMING THE LOST Memorials, with City Lore hiring photographers to document the memorials and professionally archiving them. Both projects echo the major cultural initiative that City Lore organized around the September 11th memorials that cropped up around the City. That work culminated in an exhibit curated for the New-York Historical Society in 2002 for which the physical memorials in the exhibit were acquired by the New-York Historical, and have become a major archival resource for researchers, writers and others studying that period. (https://citylore.org/)

About Great Small Works: Great Small Works was founded in 1995 by a collective of six artists, all veterans of Bread and Puppet Theater, to create theater of high artistic quality and to keep theater at the heart of social life. The company draws on puppet, avant-garde and popular theater traditions to tell contemporary stories. We perform in theaters, schools, parks, libraries, museums, prisons, street corners and other public spaces, producing work on many scales, from gigantic outdoor spectacles with scores of volunteers to miniature shows in living rooms. In curated festivals and decades-running Spaghetti Dinners, we collaborate with artists from varied traditions, provide performance opportunities for artists in diverse genres, and engage young artists in the process of finding their own voices. In community-based pageants and parades, we work with students, activists and artists to address issues of concern to them. On any scale Great Small Works productions seek to renew, cultivate and strengthen the spirits of their audiences, believing in theater as a model for participating in democracy. (https://greatsmallworks.org)

About Mano a Mano: Mexican Culture Without Borders is a New York-based non-profit organization 501(c)(3) dedicated to celebrating Mexican culture and promoting the understanding of Mexican traditions through arts, culture, humanities, and annual celebrations of holidays (Day of the Dead/Día de Muertos; Christmas/Posadas y Pastorelas), as well as festivals, concerts, performances, processions, installations, and seminars. Mexicans and New York area residents celebrate the richness and diversity of Mexican arts in five key areas: music, dance, visual arts, verbal arts and ritual, and culinary traditions. (https://www.manoamano.nyc)

About Green-Wood: Established in 1838, The Green-Wood Cemetery, a National Historic Landmark, is recognized as one of the world’s most beautiful cemeteries. As the permanent residence of over 570,000 individuals, Green-Wood’s magnificent grounds, grand architecture, and world-class statuary have made it a destination for half a million visitors annually, including national and international tourists, New Yorkers, and Brooklynites. At the same time, Green-Wood is also an outdoor museum, an arboretum, and a repository of history. Throughout the year, it offers innovative programs in arts and culture, nature and the environment, education, workforce development, restoration, and research, as well as bold initiatives in climate resiliency and sustainability. For more information, please visit www.green-wood.com.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.