I am so grateful to The Autoethnographer for publishing my essay “The Pivotal—and Pivoting—Role of the Arts During Covid.” I cannot overstate how much I valued virtual arts experiences during the long months of lockdown, and well beyond that. I have always relied on the arts and art-makers, even during the best of times, and I will forever be in awe of how they kept sending work out into the world during the worst of times.
In the essay I mention many arts groups and other nonprofits or creatives, mostly in and around my home near Philadelphia, with a smaller cluster in Santa Fe, which is my artistic home-away-from-home. My list of pandemic heroes includes: People’s Light, BalletX, Santa Fe Opera, UnTours, Atlas Obscura, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Bryn Mawr Film Institute, Santa Fe Arts Tours, Collected Works, Narberth Bookshop, The Rosenbach Museum & Library, Tiny Dynamite, Chanticleer, and Nonprofit Quarterly.
I also mention the extraordinary video of “The Irish Blessing” produced by more than 300 congregations in Ireland during the early days of the pandemic. I cannot count how many times I’ve taken pleasure in this 7-minute Irish love letter to the world, which seamlessly and oh-so-optimistically stitches together individual musicians and voices who could not gather in person at that time.
I wrote and rewrote this essay many times over, always thinking/hoping we were at the end of the pandemic, then finding we were not yet there. Now the worst of that is in the rearview mirror, although artists and arts organizations (at least in the U.S.) have new reasons to be concerned in 2025 and beyond. I know the resiliency runs deep, and I know we need the arts now more than ever.