The community’s pandemic reflections are on display in an exciting collaborative exhibition, Williamsburg: Our Town2020 community art project, made possible by a partnership between the Williamsburg Regional Library, William & Mary Libraries, Muscarelle Museum of Art, and local arts organization CultureFix VA.
The exhibition is staged at the Stryker Center library exhibition space, 412 N. Boundary St., Williamsburg, and will run from 8/29/20 through 10/31/20.
In April 2020, the Williamsburg Regional Library (WRL) invited the community to participate in an art and memory project to capture the realities of life under quarantine. Over 130 items were submitted, including visual and written art. William & Mary Libraries also started a Life During COVID-19 documentation project and collected photographs, poems, journals, artwork, and videos from the campus and local community. The exhibition also includes the debut of CultureFix VA’s community wine bottle sculpture, Stay at Home. This impressive work of collaborative art includes over 250 wine bottles painted by community members, displayed in a stylized house frame.
Submissions to the libraries were curated and mounted by staff from the Muscarelle Museum of Art and William & Mary Libraries. The exhibition is mounted on the Stryker Center windows facing Boundary Street and City Square and visible from outside the building 24/7 to allow for open air social distancing and a dynamic street art experience. The exhibition also includes a digital display scrolling poetry and other written material submitted by community members.
In addition to being able to view the exhibition in the Stryker Center windows anytime, CultureFix volunteers will be staffing the Stryker Center from 5-7 p.m. on Tuesdays for those interested in seeing the Stay at Home sculpture up close.
Read the full text of our essay submissions:
Car Parades and Electronic Classrooms: Being a Teacher in 2020 by Diane Huebner
Too Many Toddlers to Tolerate: A Tiny Tale of Today’s Tough Times by Gabby Lynch
Read the full text of our poetry submissions:
2020 by Katarina Smith
An Ode for my Sister by Mary Petzinger
COVID Poem by Barbara Best
This Thing We Bear by Kimberly Ankney
This Too Shall Pass and When It Does: What Will You Be Holding On To? by Cassandra Surles
The Magical, the Miserable, the Minuscule: Haikus by Anna Buck
The Trouble with Trauma by Anna Buck
I Am Here by Moné Doucet
Psalm in a Time of Discord by John J. Livecchi
