COVID 5 Years Later: A Conversation

COVID 5 Years Later: A Conversation

March 13, 2025 | 4pm - 6pm | CU Art Museum (Gallery)

Hosted by the CU Art Museum and the Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA)

Event Information

Thursday, March 13, 2025, 4pm - 6pm
CU Art Museum (Gallery)
Event is free and open to the public.
Masks are highly encouraged for this event.
Treats and snacks available for attendees.

A panel discussion in the CU Art Museum gallery that reflected on the personal and collective experiences of COVID-19. This event took place on the 5th anniversary of CU Boulder’s campus closure due to the pandemic.

This event was inspired by the Better Days exhibition at the CU Art Museum, which asks: What can art offer in difficult times? In this exhibition, artists respond to moments when uncertainty prevails and social connections fray. In many of the artworks on view, artists imagine a better world, encouraging viewers to find silver linings. Others meet challenging times with challenging content. The themes in Better Days provide a framework for exploring how art can help us process crises, heal, and reimagine the world.

The panel, moderated by Sophia Baldwin, explored the pandemic's multifaceted impact, with Associate Professor Lucy Chester sharing her personal experience with COVID-19 and its long-term effects (you can read Chester's personal remarks here). Jeanne Quinn, artist and Ceramics Professor, discussed artists’ roles in healing and the CU Boulder Department of Art & Art History's response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Dr. Matthew McQueen, who served as the Director of Epidemiology for the Pandemic Response Office during COVID-19, highlighted the pandemic's scientific and collaborative challenges.

Read here "The Art of Tolerating the Intolerable: Lucy Chester’s Personal Reflections on Navigating Life with Long Covid"

For final remarks, local artist Heather Schulte shared a brief presentation about her project, Stitching the Situation. Her collaborative art project was created as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, offering a space for connection, healing, and a way to grieve amidst physical isolation. The project has served as a vigil, a real-time archive of individual pandemic experiences, and a memorial for those who have passed. It also invites people across the country to participate in the act of stitching as a form of collective healing.

The event concluded with attendees (total around 40) sharing their own reflections on the pandemic via cards with prompts in relation to the Better Days exhibition, as well as participating in a reception in the CU Art Museum lobby. Overall, this event emphasized the importance of dialogue and community in processing crises and the resilience of the human spirit.

Please contact the CHA for any questions at cu-cha@colorado.edu.

Sophia Baldwin (Moderator)

During Baldwin's time as a student at CU Boulder, she wrote about her experience contracting COVID-19 in March 2020. Read Sophia's essay "The Surface & Shadow of COVID-19" here.

Hi there! I am a film production CU alumni and a video producer in Denver. I remember the day the university closed due to the pandemic. I was actually sitting at the front desk of this museum and I didn't know it at the time, but I would be contracting a severe case of COVID a couple weeks later. I'm honored to moderate this panel, share my story, and learn from all of you. Looking forward to the conversation.

Lucy Chester, Associate Professor, Department of History, CU Boulder

Lucy Chester will provide remarks at this event and share her experiences with COVID-19.

Professor Chester teaches courses on British imperialism, nationalism, and anticolonialism. Her classes focus on South Asia in a transnational context, with attention to the Middle East and Africa. Some of the courses she teaches include "Borderlands of Empire," "Decolonization of the British Empire," and a cornerstone seminar on South Asian nationalism. Professor Chester also teaches in the International Affairs program.

Professor Chester received both her B.A. summa cum laude and Ph.D. from Yale. Her first book, Borders and Conflict in South Asia (Manchester University Press, 2009), explores the drawing of the boundary between India and Pakistan in 1947. Her current book manuscript (under contract with Oxford University Press) examines connections between India and the Palestine Mandate in the 1920s-1940s. Chester is in the early stages of a project on the geographical imagination of Pakistan. Her work has been supported by the American Institute for Pakistan Studies, the American Institute for Indian Studies, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.

Jeanne Quinn, Professor, Art & Art History, CU Boulder

Jeanne Quinn received her undergraduate degree cum laude in art history from Oberlin College; she recieved her MFA in ceramics from the University of Washington. She has exhibited widely, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Robischon Gallery, Denver; Grimmerhus Museum, Denmark; Formargruppen Gallery, Malmö, Sweden; Sculpturens Hus, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Taipei County Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taipei, Taiwan. She has been a resident artist at the MacDowell Colony, the Archie Bray Foundation, the International Ceramic Center in Denmark, and the Kahla Porcelain Factory and the Ceramic Center-Berlin in Germany.

Her work is included in the books The Artful Teapot, by Garth Clark; Postmodern Ceramics, by Mark Del Vecchio; Sex Pots, by Paul Matthieu; A Ceramic Continuum: Fifty Years of the Archie Bray Influence, by Peter Held, and Confrontational Ceramics, by Judith Schwartz. She has lectured widely at institutions such as UCLA, USC, the Kansas City Art Institute, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Minnesota, Alfred University, and many others.

Matthew McQueen, Sc.D., Epidemiology (Biostatistics), Principal Epidemiologist at MITRE, Affiliate Professor Adjoint, Integrative Physiology, CU Boulder

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. McQueen played a critical role in ensuring the safety of the CU Boulder community. Dr. McQueen served as the Director of Epidemiology for the Pandemic Response Office at CU Boulder, overseeing key strategies during the crisis.

His work included collaborating with facilities management to assess and enhance air ventilation systems across campus buildings, a vital step in minimizing virus transmission. His contributions during a time of uncertainty and rapidly evolving information were instrumental in maintaining the health of students, faculty, and staff.

His expertise in epidemiology and biostatistics, along with his dedication to public health, will inform his reflections and experiences shared as part of the panel.