City Lore Gallery To Commemorate 5th Anniversary of the First COVID-19 Cases In New York City

City Lore and Naming the Lost Memorials (NTLM) invites the general public to a panel discussion and community conversation to honor the 5th anniversary of the first COVID-19 cases in New York City. Healing through Remembrance: Memorializing Covid, Five Years and Beyond is scheduled for Wednesday, March 5th from 6:30 – 9:00 pm at the City Lore Gallery located at 56 East 1st street. Masks are required.

Since May 2020, soon after the pandemic struck, Naming the Lost Memorials, comprised of a small team of volunteer artists, activists, and folklorists, curated memorial sites in New York City to name and remember victims of the COVID-19 pandemic. From 2023-2025, with support from the Mellon Foundation's Monuments Project and the sponsorship of City Lore, they have worked with 45 community groups and a large team of artists and activists to install memorials at Green-Wood Cemetery and St. Mark's Church in conjunction with Mano a Mano's Día de Muertos celebration.

The March 5th live event/panel discussion in the City Lore Gallery will also be broadcast on Zoom (link provided through RSVP)

RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1246547008659?aff=oddtdtcreator

The 2025 Memorial Exhibit at Green-Wood Cemetery will take place on May 8th – June 8th, with the activation ceremony at 6:30 PM on May 8th.

March 5 PROGRAM

6:30 pm. HISTORY OF THE NAMING THE LOST MEMORIALS INITIATIVE - Presentation by Megan Paradis Hanley, theater maker, activist, and educator; Jenny Romaine, artist, organizer and educator; Sandra Bell, artist, producer and educator.

6:45 pm. AUTHOR TALK, Presentation by Robert W. Snyder, public historian, journalist, author and educator regarding his latest book, When the City Stopped, Stories from New York's Essential Workers

In When the City Stopped, Robert Snyder tells the story of COVID-19 in the words of ordinary New Yorkers, illuminating the fear and uncertainty of life in the early weeks and months, as well as the solidarity that sustained the city. The story is told through the words of health care workers, grocery clerks, transit workers, and community activists who recount their experiences in poems, first-person narratives, and interviews. When the City Stopped preserves for future generations what it was like to be in New York when it was at the center of the pandemic.

6:55 pm CONVERSATION WITH NTLM COMMUNITY PARTNERS - Moderated by Kay Turner, artist, scholar and folklorist, this is an opportunity to hear directly from project participants their wisdom and ideas as we explore the use of communal memorials and how best to continue to memorialize COVID moving forward.

8:00 pm OPEN CONVERSATION WITH AUDIENCE – As we commemorate the enormous impact that COVID has had on our city, and the importance of communal memorials, we invite people to share their thoughts and memories. Join us in addressing what we have learned about healing and remembrance, and how we should continue to remember and memorialize the pandemic in years to come.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Megan Paradis Hanley is a theater maker, activist, and educator. For the past 15 years, she has collaborated with artists and activists in New York, Galicia, Peru, and Mexico. Paradis Hanley is a Core Member of Superhero Clubhouse and a former Siti Company Associate Artist. She teaches movement and acting at the New School and was an activist trainer with the Yes Men from 2012-2020. She holds a Master's degree in performance studies from NYU.

Jenny Romaine is a director, designer and puppeteer and co-founder/artistic director of the OBIE winning Great Small Works visual theater collective. She is music director of Jennifer Miller's CIRCUS AMOK and artist in residence at Milk Not Jails and Inside Change. With Great Small Works Romaine performs, teaches, and directs in theaters, schools, parks, libraries, museums, prisons, street corners, and other public spaces, producing work on many scales, from gigantic outdoor spectacles with scores of participants, to miniature shows in living rooms. She has directed and designed community-based spectacles for numerous projects in New York City and around the world.

Sandra A. M Bell is a production manager, producer, teaching artist and a third generation carnival Costume Designer.  She is CEO of Journeyagents, Inc, an artist booking and special event production company. In addition, she is the Co-Founder of JOUVAYFEST Collective, which preserves and presents Trinidad & Tobago classic style J'ouvert locally, nationally and internationally. In 2023, she was the recipient of the Cultural Ambassador Residency, an initiative of City Lore's Creative Traditions Program.

Robert W. Snyder is Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University.   He has worked with museums, film makers and public radio. For more than 40 years, he has conducted oral history projects and for twenty years he taught oral history at Rutgers University-Newark.  His own work in oral history has formed part of the research base for his books and articles, he also edited one book of oral histories ("Transit Talk: New York's Bus and Subway Workers Tell Their Stories"). His focus is in urban history, immigration history, labor history, and the history of popular culture with a focus on New York City.

Kay Turner is an artist and scholar working across disciplines including performance, writing, music, exhibition curation, and public and academic folklore. She was the Folk Arts Director at the Brooklyn Arts Council from 2000-2014. She is known for her interest in and writing on altars, shrines and memorials. Her books and essays include Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women's Altars and “September 11th: The Burden of the Ephemeral.” Turner was Adjunct Assistant Professor in NYU's Performance Studies Dept for many years and taught courses on memorials and ephemerality. She is a past president of the American Folklore Society.    

About NAMING THE LOST Memorials -The memorials consisted of thousands of nameplates with personalized drawings and photos, created by the families and friends of those who have lost loved ones to the virus.  Green-Wood Cemetery is the home to new memorials each spring with the next scheduled for May 2025. Naming the Lost Memorials is funded by the Monuments Project, a special grant-making initiative of the Mellon Foundation. The planning team includes: Juan Aguirre, director of Mano a Mano; Sandra A. M. Bell, artist and producer; Elena Martínez, City Lore folklorist and Producer; Megan Paradis Hanley, theater artist and educator; Jenny Romaine, artist, organizer, and educator; Seth Schonberg, City Lore archivist; Kay Turner, folklorist and performer; and Steve Zeitlin, City Lore, founder and co-director. www.ntlm.org

About City Lore & Memorializing - In the earliest days of the pandemic, City Lore launched Touching Hearts Not Hands a call for creative responses to the developing situation. From the moment the call went out, this project took as its goal to document and preserve the folk culture that has developed in response to the COVID-19 epidemic, collecting hundreds of songs, poems, videos, images of signs from shop windows and other material. Both projects echo the major cultural initiative that City Lore organized around the September 11th memorials that cropped up around the city. That work culminated in an exhibit curated for the New-York Historical Society in 2002 for which the physical memorials in the exhibit were acquired by the New-York Historical, and have become a major archival resource for researchers, writers and others studying that period. citylore.org/archives

About City Lore - Founded in 1985, and now an Affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, City Lore's mission is to foster New York City – and America's – living cultural heritage through education and public programs.  We document, present, and advocate for New York City's grassroots cultures to ensure their living legacy in stories and histories, places and traditions.  We work in four cultural domains:  urban folklore and history; preservation; arts education; and grassroots poetry traditions. For more info: http://www.citylore.org.

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