Covid Art Museum is the first art museum born on Instagram during the lockdown thanks to the initiative of three advertising creatives: José Guerrero, Irene Llorca and Emma Calvo, founders of this virtual gallery.
A mask in the shape of a CD carried by a woman dyed pink, a Gioconda guarding toilet paper, a choreography of toilets carrying a coffin full of green figures of this virus…these are some of the works in the Covid Art Museum.
You can have a look to the artworks following the Instagram Profile “covidartmusuem”.
The idea for the virtual museum was introduced at the beginning of the lockdown in Spain on 16 March 2020. Observing how people were behaving, they realised that people were taking advantage of the free time to create art. But it happened that people painted at home and the artwork stayed in a drawer. The idea was born so that these works could have been seen by a virtual audience.
The museum currently has 163,000 followers and more than 900 works, but every day new works continue to be uploaded, which perhaps now do not speak of COVID itself, but of the new reality that the pandemic has left us with.
As far as the artists, many are well-known, like Banksy, already known all over the world, but there are also many emerging artists or even people who are not artists. There are no special conditions for sharing works in the digital museum, apart from being thematically in line with covid and showing some reflections.
To upload the works, the creators always ask beforehand if they can publish and tag the artists so that people can find them and appreciate other works by the same artists. In addition, artists have to fill in a form before their works are uploaded, so that no copyright problems occur.
This idea was born in Spain, but artists from more than 100 countries have sent their works: among them Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and Spain.
Many similar instagram accounts have emerged since then, but the creators are aware that the number of followers make the difference.
The creators would like to exhibit the works in a physical space to close in style the project, but it is complicated, especially because the works are digital and they are afraid that they might look bad if printed.
The works have received a lot of criticism, both positive and negative, but the important thing is that art has been communicated, reaching more than 100 countries.