Brooklyn Artist, Social Justice Group Raise Coronavirus Awareness

PROSPECT HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN – A Brooklyn-based artist has collaborated with a Harlem youth development and social justice organization in a project that helps to increase public awareness to the disproportionate number of coronavirus cases that occur among communities of color.

Artist Carrie Mae Weems is working with Brotherhood-Sister Sol, the Harlem-based group in a collaborative effort that combines Weems’ art with the organization’s “Peace Poets” to create a presentation that will be visualized both in English and Spanish on billboards around New York City and Harlem and that will also be included in social media broadcasted public service announcements.

"We’ve all been impacted by COVID-19. It's an ecological health crisis of epic proportion—an international disaster,” Weems said in a news release issued by Brotherhood/Sister Sol on Wednesday. “And yet we have indisputable evidence that people of color have been disproportionately impacted. The death toll in these communities is staggering. This fact affords the nation an unprecedented opportunity to address the impact of social and economic inequality in real time. Denial does not solve a problem.”

Weems uses multiple mediums such as photography, video, digital imagery, text, fabric to explore themes of cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, family relationships and the consequences of power.

Weems was named one of Bro/Sis’s two inaugural Artist in Residence in March 2020 along with Bill T. Jones. In this role, she collaborates with Bro-Sis’s members and alumni on select works, participates in virtual conversations on the topics of art and advocacy, and serves as an advisor on arts programming and art installations, according to the news release.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black Americans account for almost a quarter of coronavirus-related deaths but only 13 percent of the country’s population.

“COVID-19 has brought further into the light, for all to see, the gross inequalities of our nation,” Brotherhood/Sister Sol co-founder and Executive Director Khary Lazarre-White said in the news release. “The profound racial and class disparities of deaths from COVID have been laid bare. Through this public health, artist and activist collaboration with one of the greatest visual artists of our generation, we seek to both further expose the inequities and to create public health messaging that brings awareness.”