FGCU Remembers: The Covid Memorial Project
ArtLab and Library Lawn
At the first anniversary of FGCU’s initial period of remote instruction in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Art Professor Patricia Fay and Integrated Studies Chair Dr. Maria Roca led a campus-wide effort to reflect on this very challenging year. FGCU Remembers includes a major public art installation, an accompanying interactive exhibition in the ArtLab Gallery, and several campus events during the period of March 23 – April 5. As an educational institution, we feel that it is important that FGCU provide a space to remember, to learn, and to create visions for the future.
Art Installation on the Library Lawn: Field of Remembrance, Cathedral of Sky
The centerpiece of this effort is an art installation composed of ten thousand blue and white porcelain votive flowers on the Library Lawn titled Field of Remembrance, Cathedral of Sky, illustrating the magnitude of the number of lives lost to the virus in Southwest Florida and across the state. From January to March 2021 more than a hundred students and campus volunteers worked together to produce these votives, prepare them for the installation, and plant them on the FGCU Library Lawn.
Interactive Exhibition in the ArtLab Gallery, FGCU Library
The accompanying exhibition in the ArtLab Gallery documents the collaborative production of the installation, highlights student works from the Bower School of Music & the Arts, offers examples of artists confronting Covid, and provides the opportunity to contribute personal reflections on what we have lost, what we have learned, and what we hope for as we approach the beginning of the end of this pandemic.
Student works featured in the exhibition include: Music To Breathe/Música para Respirar, an extraordinary global project created by the Bolivian Chamber Music Society with FGCU Piano Performance major Fernando López Flores; a short film titled Orbit from Theatre major Ioannis Georgulis on the overwhelming uncertainties of quarantine lockdown; Covid-oriented banner images from Digital Media Design majors Haley Keller and Brooke Regent; photographs documenting the installation by Art major Tiffany Shadden; and reflective writings on the pandemic from students in ART 3782: Contemporary Ceramics.
Image credit: Photo by Tiffany Shadden
Video credit: Photo by Joseph Adams
