It is often said that art knows no bounds and street artists from Delhi are proving so. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, that has forced people to stay indoors and limit their work, street artists are honing their skills and adorning the city. The street art is not just alluring to the eye but also extremely meaningful. What might be a redundant, dull wall to you and me is a canvas to a street artist. Beautifully-crafted murals and artwork have painted the city in an embellishment.
A worker who helps street artists in Delhi said “I am a daily wage worker who lost my job at a factory and as a vagabond I saw some street artists painting walls in Delhi. I approached them and they hired me for additional help. They are very kind and provide me with protective gear and food. Now, I have something to look forward to, I am liking how the artists are so zealous and driven yet practical and cautious during this unfortunate time.”
There are of course massive losses incurred by artists and photographers who aren’t able to hold their scheduled exhibitions. Street art is a ray of sunshine during the pandemic
Planet earth has witnessed various pandemics and disease outbreaks like plague, cholera, influenza, smallpox, among others. Direct parallels have been drawn with the Spanish flue which paralyses the world exactly a century ago in 1918. The world is struggling to develop a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 novel Corona virus and there have been various attempts at finding out foolproof cure for the deadly virus. The 1918 influenza pandemic (Spanish flu) infected over 500 million people over a span of two years.
According to Artnet News, “There are few obvious depictions of the disease in canonized art and literature, and the images it recalls are not as vivid as those that followed, say, the AIDS crisis.”
Trevor Smith, a curator at the Peabody Essex Museum and the co-curator of an exhibition on the Spanish Flu held last year at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia said “ “Millions of people lost their lives around the world, and it’s hard to even wrap your head around that,” he says. “There haven’t been many monuments or memorials to the people who died in that pandemic.”
Trevor Smith and his team commissioned a collective for “Spit Spreads Death,” referred to as Blast Theory to create by mental act a new work to commemorate Spanish flu. Their resolution was to arrange a 500-person parade, on Broad Street in Metropolis in September 2019. Marchers displayed placards with the names of victims and tending employees UN agency died throughout the pandemic in respect to a parade of two hundred thousand people
A similar instance can be quoted during the COVID-19 pandemic when an edition of New York Times on May 24,2020 enlisted the names of Americans who lost their lives to the Coronavirus.
By Kunjan Ahluwalia