Planning for the Future

What lies ahead grows out of what lies behind. Currently we have three frames that collectively house 2,700 hearts and which were made to honor healthcare workers, frontline workers, and the experience of mourning the death of a loved one in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. To complete “The Hearts Project,” we will need 12 more frames, each one dedicated to another important aspect of the pandemic.

As project creator/director, I envision future frames and artistic designs that will confront transformative, unsettling experiences during the holidays, represent the experience of isolation from human contact, and, perhaps most important, highlight the voices of those who are rarely allowed to speak and are even more rarely heard.

To this end, I have begun preliminary sketches and planning for a “COVID’s First Christmas” frame. I have also begun collecting thoughts for a nine-panel frame made with shades of blue hearts to depict layers of isolation, and for a frame design featuring a rainbow prism symbolizing that the pandemic had no boundaries—it affected rich and poor, young and old, all gender combinations, all races and nationalities, people of all political leanings, and more.

Always planning for a future when all 13,068 hearts will one day be on display, I have reached even further by imagining potential frames dedicated to the incarcerated, to children and to the elderly, and, also, for one dedicated to those living in rural areas without access to updated news or medical facilities.