Many students adapted and even stepped up their game, finding creative ways to continue working
Art student Patrick Brennan, M.F.A. ’20, offered a thoughtful perspective on being an artist restricted by social distancing. He posted a video featuring 33 works on paper on Instagram, titled “You can make drawings anywhere!”
“The idea of losing our space is the worst,” he wrote, “ but finding ways through adaptive materials and a fluid, stream of conscious[ness] approach, we can keep working. That’s always been the strength of drawing for me – by any means necessary!”
Landscape architecture student Lyuxiao Liu, M.L.A. ’20, spent her last Cornell semester at AAP NYC, the College of Architecture, Art and Planning’s program in New York City. When the city went on lockdown, she captured the sudden change in a sonic diary for a class assignment.
Her sound collage, “032220,” is named for the date New York City’s stay-at-home order went into effect. “It was the day when the city that never sleeps was forced to be settled in an eerie way,” she said.
To evoke the city’s mood, Liu collected “different sounds and voices that can make up a New Yorker’s world before and after this day,” she said.
Since she had to stay indoors and couldn’t venture out to record sounds, the “work is highly subjective,” she said. “The overall idea is to deliver a picture of a society that was suddenly and profoundly altered by an invisible yet fatal force. Our own voice of mind and the sounds we may not even have noticed before unravel during self-quarantine. When one door closes, another opens.”
Chenglin Zhu ’23, an international student from China, created a four-page info comic of frequently asked questions about coronaviruses, as an assignment for a first-year writing seminar with Jon McKenzie, professor of practice in English in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). Zhu used information from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Peking Union Medical College Hospital.
Rachel Prentice, associate professor of science and technology studies in A&S, found her students ready to alter their coursework in the graduate-undergraduate seminar Moving and Knowing.
“I asked students if they would be interested in shifting gears from topics like dance to thinking about moving and knowing in this new moment,” she said. “The responses were hugely enthusiastic.”
After some quick changes to the syllabus, she asked students for weekly personal reflections on their lives. “Their responses were predictably smart, moving and a lovely set of snapshots of what Cornell students are doing and thinking about during this moment of mass social disruption.”
Tina Lam, M.F.A. ’21, an art student in AAP, began a video project in Prentice’s course, then switched to making drawings at home of her video stills. She wrote: “My parents are genocide refugees from Cambodia. The mere fact that they have landed in Canada has undeniably been the source of wealth in my life; modest cost of housing, good social network, free health care … Now that we are reunited and confined at home, my mom keeps reminding us how humility, resilience and compassion are more constructive in times of crisis than fear and resentment.”