TAUNY - News

TAUNY invites the North Country community to share their stories of and creative responses to the Coronavirus Pandemic for the new “Get the Folk Through It” Pandemic Documentation Project. TAUNY wants to hear from you about your experience over the past months and going forward, with the pandemic changing many of our daily ways, while also reinforcing our sense of what’s most familiar and important to us.

TAUNY invites you to share any or all of the following: stories about how the pandemic has affected you, your loved ones, your community, your job/profession, or other major aspects of your life; stories about how it has changed or interrupted your regular traditions or routines; stories about new traditions (or ways of carrying on traditions) you’ve created or seen others creating in response; arts, hobbies, or activities you’ve taken up or spent more time with while staying at home; creative responses to the pandemic; things you see around you—in your home, on the street, in nature—that are signs of the times and how the pandemic is affecting life in our region; anything else you’d like to share.

“At TAUNY, we always aim to not only document and showcase, but to connect people around and through our region’s cultures, particularities, and daily ways of life,” says TAUNY Director of Research and Programs Camilla Ammirati. “In these strange and difficult times, people are working so hard and so creatively to get through, to maintain the things most important to us, and to find new possibilities in current circumstances. Sharing these stories and responses creates a vital record for the future. It helps highlight our region’s rich culture, character, and traditions as we go forward, and it helps us get through what’s hardest about—and celebrate what’s best in—our current moment. We hope you’ll share yours!”

Interested participants can share by emailing stories, creative responses, photos, videos, and audio recordings to programs@tauny.org with the heading “Pandemic Documentation Project.” Please include your name, contact information, hometown, age, and anything else you’d like to include. TAUNY will compile these materials and find a meaningful way to share them with the community down the road. Please also follow us on social media (@thetaunycenter) and stay tuned for further specific prompts and surveys related to this project.

As part of this project, TAUNY also invites community members to take part in the Face Mask Call and Challenge by sharing photos of their face masks and the stories behind them. The masks you wear—whether through pattern, design, how you acquired it, the fabric and other materials it uses, etc.—may cover your face, but it can also show many things about you. It can say something about your personality, your interests, your connection to fiber arts traditions, your heritage, your personal connections, and more. “For instance,” Ammirati adds, “My favorite of the masks I’ve been wearing is one my mother made for me, which represents to me not only her love and care for me but also her many years of sewing and quilting, and how she and my aunts carry on craft traditions that they learned from my grandmother, who was a sewist among other things. It’s a bonus that these things come through in the images of buttons on the fabric my mother used for this mask.”

Over the coming month, TAUNY invites you to share a photo of your meaningful mask, and if you’d like to take it to the next level, make a mask that expresses something about you, your background, your medium if you’re an artist, and/or other elements of your experience, and to share with TAUNY for an upcoming exhibit feature (online and/or in person). Share photos with TAUNY at programs@tauny.org by July 31. Please include your name, email and/or phone number, and any story or explanation about your mask that you’d like to share. You can also stop by The TAUNY Center to take a mask selfie at our selfie station—the chalk board on the door just to the right of our storefront windows! Post your selfie and tag TAUNY on Facebook and Instagram (@thetaunycenter) and/or email your selfie to programs@tauny.org.

(Pictured here: The Fiddling Bear, part of TAUNY's collection, was carved by Elwood "Woody" Adams of Malone around 2003.)

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