Mourning and memorializing in the COVID-19 era

This short essay engages the efforts of artists, activists, and mourners to memorialize those who have died during the COVID-19 pandemic. These commemorative sites provide needed correctives to the physical absences, political opportunism, and statistical abstractions that have tended to personify the pandemic. As with the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the tropes of individualism and tactility materialize frequently in conversations about these displays. Despite the generative impulses of these memorials, it is imperative that these creations move beyond performative gestures of sentimentality to ensure that the civic agony inflicted by anti-science and far-right movements is not repeated.