To document the cascade of public health, social, and financial crises set in motion by COVID-19, the Archives of American Art, which is headquartered in Washington, DC and has a research center in New York City, created an oral history series that recorded responses to the global pandemic across the American art world.

Naming the Lost Memorials is collective of artists, activists, and folklorists who have been making public awareness memorials in New York City since May 2020. “There has been no national day of mourning set aside for the Covid dead,” says folklorist Kay Turner. “So many people died alone, and burials and rituals have been deferred. While heads of state do not perform their solemn duties to comfort the afflicted and mourn the dead, the rest of us rise to confront this tragedy.”

We publish a broad range of text, video, audio and photo stories, primarily focused on people--top state and federal officials, healthcare workers, food deliverers, the young and old, the healthy and vulnerable, the helpers and those who needed help. Everybody, in a word.

This project is dedicated to Bronx Community College and its borough of New York City. Specifically, we are focused on our college’s experience of the pandemic. Students and staff are prompted for submission and their work is given priority for curation.

Documentation, poetry, international stories, and historical analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic from March to August 2020, with an emphasis on Asian Americans and global Asians.

North Brooklyn Narratives, a volunteer-led oral history initiative, collects and preserves accounts of life in Greenpoint & Williamsburg in 2020 (or “the plague year,” loosely defined, continuing into 2021.) Narratives cover topics including the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter Uprising, community organizing, small business ownership and other experiences of this extraordinary historical moment.

The project conducts recorded virtual interviews, and collects digital artifacts documenting the experiences of Asian/Pacific American individuals and communities during the pandemic. While we cast a wide net and work to include stories from Asian/Pacific American communities that often remain unrecorded, by virtue of our institutional location we also have a particular interest in New York City and the university communities in which we are embedded.

Our project analyzed the impact COVID-19 had on the lives of CUNY students and their communities. As a Hispanic-Serving Institution and Minority-Serving Institution with a diverse student body from throughout the N.Y.C. region, John Jay provides a unique and vital perspective into how the changes caused by the pandemic affected minority and immigrant communities, students from working class backgrounds, and first-generation college students.

“We document the lived experiences of people who live, work, and study in the Bronx and New York City during this pandemic.…At a time when there is growing outrage about the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black people, poor people, and immigrants, recording the voices of Bronx residents--the vast majority of whom fall into at least one of those categories--represents an act of resistance as well as an affirmation of our collective conscience.”

The Museum of the City of New York collects artifacts and photographs that speak to the pandemic and racial justice movement to tell the story of this incredibly challenging time to future generations. A social media campaign and an open call have brought in artifacts and photographs from all five boroughs. Collecting began with the start of the pandemic and is ongoing.

COVID POC collects audio diaries, music, and portraits. “Rather than using statistics to tell the stories of people of color in quarantine, Covid Diaries empower the speaker and the listener. This oral history project highlights the resilience of our communities and the power of voice. I produced the soundscapes to immerse the audience, generate relatability, and build bonds.” -Nadia DeLane

Cityscape Blue by Nadia DeLane, acrylic and paper 2018

The Brooklyn College digital archive documents the stories and experiencers of Brooklyn College students, faculty, staff, alumni and community members related to Covid-19.

“…while I have never seen my city mourn like this, I have never seen it come together like this either. Every night at 7 pm, Maryann, two houses down from mine, stands in her driveway and plays “God Bless America” on a speaker for all the neighbors to hear.”

Shore Parkway, Brooklyn: Photo by Marisa Albano.

The collection documents the experiences of COVID-19 in the African diaspora, both broadly and in New York City with a focus on Harlem. Our collection illuminates racial disparities in health outcomes and access, the impact of the pandemic on Black-owned businesses, and cultural production. The collection also documents the community impact of COVID-19 on New York City through state and local news and government responses to the pandemic.

Amid one of the most historically significant but fracturing moments in most of our lifetimes, we collect stories of underrepresented people and groups related to COVID-19. To counter polarized narratives that dominate news cycles, we have solicited the stories of as many people as possible to capture a variety of experiences and build an archive that tells a collective narrative of tragedy, grief, and resilience. We collect audio files and associated metadata.

Queens Memory has been collecting materials – primarily oral history interviews and photos – pertaining to life in Queens for the past 10 years. When Queens became the epicenter of the pandemic in New York City, we switched gears to document this unique moment in history. All our content is born digital or digitized, and our collection runs the gamut from oral history interviews and still photographs to written testimonies, poetry and other creative writing, wild sound and video clips, original artwork, musical performances and more. Our project is focused on Queens and all who live, work, worship, attend school or are in some other way connected to the borough.

I am a photojournalist and documentary photographer, and when the city went into lockdown during the early days of the pandemic, I felt compelled to see what the city looked like and what people were doing outside of their homes. At the end of May, when the Black Lives Matter protests erupted in response to the killing of George Floyd, I felt compelled to photograph the protestsI spent much of the summer covering the countless protests and continued following them throughout the fall. In addition to extensively covering the protests, I photographed the frequent marches and celebrations surrounding the Presidential Election.

Juneteenth march, June 19, 2020, with signs bearing the image of George Floyd. Photo by Erica Lansner.

The New York Historical Society’s collecting around the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement are extensions of History Responds, an initiative begun after September 11, 2001 to document recent or current events. In 2020, we collected photographs, artifacts, written reminiscences, artwork, and ephemera intended for public distribution in all formats, from as many different perspectives as possible.

Nurse Cat Carnes at the height of the pandemic in New York City. Photo by Kay Hickman.

City Lore documents, preserves and presents the living cultural heritage of New York City and the United States; we collect creative responses to the pandemic as an extension of our mission. We’ve created a group poem--“It Takes a Pandemic”—and chronicled poetry, images, memorials, song parodies, youth responses to the pandemic, and oral histories of front line workers in photographs, audio recordings, video and texts.

Love in the Time of Covid. Photo by Caroline G. Harris.

Since the start of the pandemic, the New York City Fire Museum has been collecting messages of thanks to first responders in the FDNY. Objects, messages, images and videos can be submitted at the museum or online.

Towards the middle of the year 2020, as we became aware that the story of the Covid-19 pandemic would be a long one, and as protests over the killing of George Floyd washed over the city nightly, the Planning Committee of the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group convened online and decided to invite neighbors to contribute to an online cache of photographs and short writings about the entire year. Our efforts focused on the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Manhattan’s Upper West Side (96th Street to 110th Street between Central Park and Riverside Park), but neighbors submitted pictures from all over the city and even of places they moved to outside of the city to “escape” the pandemic.

Dancers at West End Avenue and 90th Street. Photo by Paul Margolis.

The Manuscripts and Special Collections unit of the New York State Library wants to preserve the experiences of people throughout New York State during the COVID-19 global pandemic. We have encouraged New Yorkers to keep diaries that we would like to collect at a later date. We are in the final stages of preparing a website where users will be able to upload photos and other media.

Photo: New York State Cultural Education Center, Albany, NY.

The Municipal Archives preserves and makes available the historical records of New York City municipal government, its holdings include paper records, digital collections, web archives, still and moving images, ledgers and docket books, vital records, cartographic materials, blueprints, and sound recordings. Mayoral and city agency records from the time of the pandemic will be processed into the Municipal Archives and Library and made available to the public according to standard procedures and timetables.

New York City Hall. Photo by Momos.

We are interviewing two hundred New Yorkers, including doctors, nurses, home health aides, funerary workers, doulas, parents, homeless people, organizers, artists, immigrants, teachers, other essential workers, public officials, and all kinds of everyday New Yorkers. Our interviews chronicle the narrators’ lives continuing into the present, and are conducted on Zoom

CoVIDA is a living memorial and artistic tribute to the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic that honors the dead, acknowledges community resilience, and recognizes the courage of essential workers.

Shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic sent New York City into quarantine, Professors Susan Smith-Peter and Joseph Frusci at the College of Staten Island created a Facebook community page so that Staten Islanders could share their stories, as well as their digital photos and videos to show how the pandemic was impacting their lives. The project seeks to create an online exhibit and oral history repository on the history of the first wave of COVID-19 on Staten Island. The Museum of the City of New York chose 7 items from the Facebook page out of more than 20,000 submissions for their exhibit New York Responds: The First Six Months, which dealt with COVID in New York City.

In the spring of 2020, LaGuardia Community College students switched to remote learning. At the same time, they took photographs inside their homes and on the streets of New York City, wrote reflections on their photography projects, and completed COVID-related assignments for their classes. Their work documents food lines and BLM protests, and explores topics such as mental health, fear of deportation, racism, bigotry, and the story of a student who ended up relocating to South Korea to be with her family.

Photo by Josue Tepancal.

The City, a non profit, nonpartisan digital news platform is tracking down all publicly reported deaths and logging them in a public digital memorial.

The New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM) has a variety of different COVID initiatives, among them an effort to gather information through a health equity lens and an attempt to gather stories from fellows, members, and staff of the NYAM community to document their experience of the pandemic.