You're Invited To Help Launch Pandemic Island Archive Project Friday August 27 - Roosevelt Island Residents To Share & Preserve Their Personal Covid 19 Stories & Experiences

Roosevelt Island resident and artist Thom Heyer reports:

Greetings!

I'm writing to let you know about a project I will be working on this Fall with Pete Yearwood from Open Doors.  The project is called Pandemic Island: Creating an Archive.  COVID-19 affected each of us on Roosevelt Island in unique & highly personal ways.  With support from Humanities NY and other Roosevelt Island allies, we are devoted to capturing our local stories & experiences in a centralized archive.  We feel that the recording of our personal experiences--including those at Coler Rehabilitation & Nursing Care Center--are important enough to be saved for posterity's sake for future generations' analysis.  What better place to store this archive than at our very own branch of the NYPL on Roosevelt Island?  The Performing Arts Library has its own specific archives at Lincoln Center.  The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has its own archives in Harlem's branch of the Library.  Roosevelt Island deserves nothing less as part of its diverse and fascinatingly sordid history. 

Come join us for snacks at our project launch.   Feel free to bring an object, story or poem to share that speaks to your COVID-19 experience during 2020 on RI........We will answer questions and welcome your thoughts on what an archive on RI could look like for us all!

Pete & I look forward to seeing you--

All the best:

Thom Heyer

Where:  Tent outside Coler....900 Main St.

When:  next Friday, 8/27 at 2:30pm 

Coler resident and Open Doors Poet Peter Yearwood shared his poetry during the height of the Covid Pandemic.

... "To Corona … We have something for you. It's called solidarity … You knock us down, we get up and brush off the dust.” ...

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