How does the coronavirus pandemic affect the possibilities for art and for sustainability?
That’s the theme of today’s Earth Week events here at the University of Vermont, which include the opening of the EcoCultureLab-supported annual student arts exhibition. With classes all online and students locked down either in their home towns and cities (several of ours are in hard-hit areas like NYC, which has become the world’s downtown) or in their homes here in and around Burlington, the pandemic is a prominent theme in the works you can see. These are displayed in a virtual gallery space called Artsteps. Instructions on how to load the exhibition and where to find supplementary materials are found on the exhibition page. The exhibition will be up until the end of the month and can be viewed at your leisure.
The Gund Institute, which co-sponsored Feverish World in 2018 and continues to be an active supporter of EcoCultureLab (including hosting our Research Raps), is holding an afternoon event today, an expert panel on “Sustainability in the Pandemic Era,” which will examine issues of food insecurity, disease ecology, mental health, Sustainable Development Goals, and building a sustainable economy in the post-coronavirus era.
The pandemic-environment relationship will continue as our focus with tomorrow’s “When Corona Met Climate Change” event (program going up soon). We’re thinking of all of these events as “postcards” — scholarly, artistic, and other sorts — from the juncture between this pandemic situation we are all living through and the environmental threats and concerns we deal with daily in our lives as teachers, students, researchers, and activists. (Thanks to the New Yorker for that image, too.)