10 artists show off the works they've produced during the pandemic

They range in subject and tone, but each speaks to the artists' experience.

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Talent and extra time at home sounds like a recipe for great art. If only it were that easy. The pandemic gave some artists here room to create, but it took away resources and funding. Others questioned their work’s purpose. Here, 10 artists on the hard-won works they’ve produced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

1. Creating art during a difficult year was therapeutic for Tiélere Cheatem, also known as The Rusty Artist. He contemplated the type of art he wanted to share and chose to paint vulnerable pieces that captured his depression. “During the start of the pandemic, I began losing all my jobs and opportunities, one by one,” he says. “The one thing I knew I could provide as a release for my own sanity was my art. I figured ‘Why not share that peace with the world as well?’” 

2. Much of Quinn Antonio Briceño’s work is inspired by Nicaragua, where he spent part of his childhood. “I have been really interested in street culture,” he says. “Many times children will be selling candy and cigarettes on the street.” That’s who appears in Se Venden Chicles, collaged with “Made in the USA” stickers, which Briceño feels represents his bi-cultural identity. 

3.  Contemporary artist Paula Haniszewski, whose work you might recognize from the Angad Arts Hotel, has turned her attention to a much larger art project—restoring a turn-of-the-century duplex in historic Belleville. The property isn’t far from her other recent rehabilitation: Hartmann Manor, the 1880 house she and husband, Tom, brought back to life last year and now call home.

4. Spring is visual artist Song Watkins Park’s favorite season. She found that experiencing it in the COVID-19 era was weird and depressing. “As a response to these emotions, I painted myself as a fictional character, Skyler White from Season 5 of Breaking Bad, with my cat, looking at cherry blossoms falling, with a terrifying smile, while the world behind me was burning,” she says.

5. Mixed-media artist Carrie Gillen hosted an art auction and donated half her profit to local organizations in need. Near the end, she had to create new work just to keep up. “In that pressure to pump out more work, sometimes you find something you didn’t expect,” she says of her favorite, In Waves.

6. When a former art teacher asked him to create a piece for Parkway Central High School in September 2019, muralist Edo Rosenblith dreamed up Panorama, and the pandemic gave him extra time to perfect it. Rosenblith says that with its imagery, from photos taken by the students themselves, the artwork “mirrors its location, a scene of students from diverse backgrounds and interests having lunch together in the school’s cafeteria.”

7. The pandemic inspired Sara Ghazi Asadollahi to consider the concept of shelter, emptiness, and void. So she created a series of paintings each featuring her sculpture work and one tiny gummy bear. “I like how this candy is connected to everyone. These gummy bears were a part of my childhood happiness and one of the very few things that we could get at that time,” she says of postwar Iran and Iraq. 

8. Maxine Thirteen struggled to finish the painting My Forgotten Man during the stay-at-home orders. Then she reevaluated why she created art and found encouragement in the work’s deeper meaning: “A new era of struggle and poverty in America, desperation and loss in a seemingly endless global pandemic, increased militarized violence, and a personal need to find catharsis through art.” 

9. Alex Paradowski combined paper, mosaic, and digital photography to make 2,000 handmade paper cubes, glued together to resemble his son, Nicholas.

10. Justin King, who works in cardboard and papier-mâché, completed two projects—a piece for The Sheldon’s “Golf the Galleries” and a large menagerie of his favorite animals—during his toddler’s nap time. “While there weren’t any opening receptions or fanfare that usually follow art openings, I am very proud of the work I did this past year,” he says.

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