The library is a place that brings communities of people together to inspire, encourage, and support learning and discovery. In the Picture Collection we are trying to support the emotional connectivity of our community by reaching out and asking how they are spending their time stuck inside their homes. Perhaps some of their projects can support and inspire some of yours as well. We invite you to respond in the comments section and let us know how you are using your creative abilities to stay productive and pass the time during this pandemic. 

Here's a sampling of what representatives of the Picture Collection community are doing to stay busy at home:

 

Jason Fulford/Tamara Shopsin

 

Perfect timing for the release of Tamara Shopsin and Jason Fulford’s new book, Offline Activities. These activities are great for sharing. Perhaps create a junk mail collage and mail it to someone who is living alone and isolated from the community. It is also a nice way to start a stuck-at-home artist residency.

 

Guy Greenberg

What should you do with the outtakes from all the images you collected on your last visit to the Picture Collection? Guy, a photographer, started posting images last week to his Instagram account: “I’ll try to keep it up daily or every few days. I only wish I scanned more at the time! I have an inbox of excited viewers….there’s a lot of creative people just laying around waiting to do something.”

While you are at home you can view a selection of our images on our Instagram @NYPLPictureCollection and through the Library’s Digital Collections.

 

Laura Glazer

Laura creates artwork at the intersections of photography, design, archiving, and curation and is based in Portland, Oregon. She regularly shares her visual and audio discoveries in her online journal, Minutiae is my muse. During this quiet time she has been busy:  “[I'm] curating an installation at the Mini Museum of Sound in Portland, Oregon, and designing a faux postage stamp, both celebrating the life and work of Hazel Hall. (She was a poet in 1920s Portland who wrote beautiful, modernist poetry about what she saw from her second floor window.) This coincides with the release of The Collected Poems of Hazel Hall in paperback.”

About the photo: Two books of poetry by Hazel Hall were published in her lifetime, Curtains in 1921, and Walkers in 1923. Cry of Time came out in 1928, four years after her death at age 38.

 

 

 

Sarah Stacke

 

Sarah is documenting her family's experiences with the school closures and virus in general. As a photojournalist her work has visually documented the daily life of communities in  Africa, and tribal nations in the United States. Recording your time at home through pictures or writing with your children can be a creative and emotionally rewarding social studies project.

For journalism resources check out the blog post: How to Access Current and Historic News Resources From Home

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fred Cray

Sourced from the Picture Collection’s folder on the subject of Advertising-1950s, Fred just made this unique photo last week. Fred often works in series and leaves them around New York City to be found. Visitors to the Picture Collection have been lucky to find his photos tucked inside our subject folders from time to time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

 

The design studio of Slow and Steady Wins the Race is busy thinking “about design and  other industries, ideally keeping minds energized and uplifted with inspiration and call to action.” With their focus on a new online portal aimed in that direction, they are  working on gathering ideas for a more livable future on Instagram with @care.info.

 

 

Georgia McGovern

Georgia feels that “being an artist requires long periods of solidarity and social distancing when working in the studio.”  But, this disruption to her normal routine has her thinking and painting about the city. “With the quiet and uncertainty of our current situation, I became interested in describing personal and cultural landmarks and the changing cityscape and effects as a result of a capitalist political economy and the environmental crisis.”

To begin your own art research try this blog post: Searching for Art Resources from Home

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abbi Newfeld

 

Happy to have an excuse to be outside, Abbi is taking advantage of any sunshine to make cyanotype prints. This beautiful blue-toned style of photography was on display in the Library’s Anna Atkins exhibit in 2018. Atkins published the first photography book, Photographs of British Algae, in the 1840s using cyanotype.

You can view it from home in our digital collections.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Augusta Palmer

Augusta, director of the film The Blues Society created “a little Coronavirus blues inspired by the Picture Collection.” Find out more about her 2016 film A is for Aye-Aye: An Abecedarian Adventure, in the blog post: "A is for Aye-Aye": How Filmmaker Augusta Palmer Uses the Picture Collection!

 

 

 

 

Let us know what you have been doing to stay inspired!