Spreading Through the Streets: The COVID-19 Street Art Database

Abstract: The COVID-19 Street Art Database is a crowdsourced collection of more than five hundred individual records containing images of street art, including stickers, tags, light projections, murals—all manner of artistic expression in the streets, in public space, written on or affixed to the built environment. This is more than an archive of visual expression; it is an archive of vernacular communicative acts, communication in process, expressing the concerns and emotions of cultural groups—especially as expressed by those who do not see themselves as part of the power structure. An exploration of this collection of images reveals that street art can address the fears and confusion surrounding all that accompanies a pandemic like COVID-19. Like verbal vernacular narrative forms, we argue that street art can make external our cultural responses to the experience of crisis. It can connect people to each other during extended periods of isolation such as quarantine, offer alternative narratives regarding relations of power and previously existing conditions of oppression and exploitation, comment on the nature of public space, and indeed multiply the impact of all these messages as well as pertinent advice and direction about safety and health—especially in a moment when in-person contact around the world has been curtailed.