An Artist Is Transforming the Parking Lot of the Queens Museum Into a Tribute to Health Care Workers ‘So Big It Can Be Seen by Satellite’

A giant new artwork paying tribute to the victims of COVID-19,
and the health care workers who put their lives on the line caring
for them, will soon appear in the parking lot of the Queens Museum,

The 20,000-square-foot mural by Cuban American artist Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada depicts a
doctor in a face mask and head covering. Titled Somos La
Luz (Spanish for We Are Light), the work aims to
put a face on the invisible victims of the global health
crisis.

“I wanted to create a place to mourn, where we can contemplate
the difficulties that so many people are going through, after
losing so many loved ones,” Rodríguez-Gerada told Artnet News in an
email. “It’s a place that, in a political climate where there is
more division than ever, we can find a way to bring ourselves back
together as a community and as a nation.”

The work also highlights the fact that the highest coronavirus
death rates have been in neighborhoods that are predominantly
black, Latino, and working class—likely because these populations
represent the majority of essential workers.

“I hope people understand first that this artwork is created in
one of the hardest hit areas in New York City, disproportionately
affecting Latinos,” Rodríguez-Gerada added.

SOMOS Community Care, a health network that
serves immigrants and Latinos, commissioned the work along with the
advocacy organization Make the Road New York and
El Museo del Barrio.

“This portrait depicts our people, executed at a gigantic
scale—so big it can be seen by satellite,” SOMOS cofounder Henry R.
Munoz III told Artnet News in an email. “It serves as a powerful
testimony, not just about where we are, but also about our hopes
for the future, our strength and our willingness to sacrifice our
lives for our country and our dreams.”

At one point, the mural features the eyes of Ydelfonso Decoo, a
physician and the secretary of SOMOS, who died of the virus

“He was a pediatrician and was close to retiring, and the fact
that he didn’t bow out, that he stayed on the front lines and made
that sacrifice really struck me,” said Rodríguez-Gerada. “It’s
heroic.”

Rodríguez-Gerada is known for his large-scale,
viewed-from-above-ground works, most notably a 2.5-acre portrait of
Barack Obama on a Spanish beachfront in 2008, and a six-acre “painting” in
soil commissioned by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery for the
National Mall in Washington, DC, in 2014. The work,
titled Out of Many,
One, featured a composite portrait based on the faces
of 50 young men, both black and white.

The post An Artist Is Transforming the Parking Lot of the
Queens Museum Into a Tribute to Health Care Workers ‘So Big It Can
Be Seen by Satellite’ appeared first on artnet News.