COVID Artifacts
James Gouldthorpe and SFMOMA
Covid Artifacts was an attempt to document the objects, people, and events that suddenly became infused with cultural relevance due to the pandemic. Each day I followed the news and searched the internet, discovering unexpected new artifacts—each artifact illustrating a new page in the global pandemic narrative. As the pandemic progressed, layers of social dysfunction were exposed; I tried to capture those moments in the archive of the times that Covid Artifacts became.
The project became a way to cope. Focusing on painting kept me from spinning out in the face of an uncertain future, and, by posting an image a day on my social media it allowed me to stay connected to friends, fellow artists, and eventually strangers. After a full year I stopped the manic daily painting as I had to return to my job in a fulltime capacity. I still paint an occasional artifact as we wait for the world to right itself.
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COVID Artifacts Chronicles Our Shared Crisis at SFMOMA
Artist James Gouldthorpe paints a record of the pandemic.
It would be difficult to select one artwork to represent the last year’s heartbreaking and sometimes absurd tragedies, but those of us at SFMOMA needn’t look far to find a worthy installation of them.
Conservation technician James Gouldthorpe, a museum employee of 25 years, is the prolific artist behind COVID Artifacts, an ongoing project that distills our time’s calamities and controversies into postcard-sized paintings. Taken together, his profound vignettes depict the real-life heroes and villains, political upheavals, hospital scenes, and newly charged objects — from toilet paper to Goya beans — that became headline staples in a year of mostly bad news.
Gouldthorpe makes each COVID Artifact in his Richmond studio using a mixture of watercolor, gouache, and ink, sharing the finished pieces on Instagram in cadence with the furious news cycle that inspires them. An installation comprising more than 80 Artifacts is now on view in the exhibition Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis on Floor 3. He says it’s a surreal experience to have his artwork shown in the same galleries he has long prepared for others.