Overview

Creativity vs. Covid: Ending the Pandemic for Good is a collaboratively curated rapid-response exhibition that shares the work of Free the Vaccine for Covid-19 (FTV), an international collective of artists and access to medicine advocates that formed in April 2020. As part of the broader movement for a people’s vaccine, their goal is to ensure that tests, treatments, and vaccines for Covid-19 are globally available and affordable. The exhibit showcases the process and products of FTV’s artistic activism. It features projects such as handmade gifts, parody music videos, and public art interventions – made by people with and without formal art training. In doing so, it introduces audiences to key issues that limit access to medicines and provides robust methods anyone can use to advocate for change.

The exhibit team included FTV members with diverse perspectives – students, teachers, activists, professional artists, and access to medicines experts – led by a curator specializing in engaged art history. The show developed quickly, while the story it tells is still unfolding. Its design is flexible, enabling the exhibit to nimbly adjust as it travels to different host campuses and communities, as FTV and its allies create new work, and as the landscape of access to Covid medicines changes. Additionally, with both virtual and physical formats, the exhibit has flexibly connected audiences with the show amid gallery closures and capacity limitations due to public health regulations. The project simultaneously documents historically significant creative activism, builds an archive for future study, and advances the ongoing work of the collective.

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Image: Free the Vaccine for Covid-19, “The virus will use the minutes we lose,” 2021, poster, 24 x 36 inches.