In the early days of the first coronavirus lockdown, my curiosity was piqued when Minneapolis artist Piotr Szyhalski started adding arresting posters to his Instagram feed that commented on the pain and politics (and utter incompetence) surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. A few days later, I asked if I could interview him for Walker Reader. I’d worked on publishing projects around his art before: in 2012, I edited an essay for the Reader on the conservation of his seminal 1997 net-art work Ding an Sich, and in 2015, I included his banner project in my Hyperallergic roundup of local art created in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. But this work, while familiar in tone and medium, was different: much more directly political and palpably more visceral. As he told me of the pandemic, “Literally the whole world is experiencing this one thing, and it's rife with criminality. Being in this moment awakened in me the need to skip the nuance and just go straight for the fucking jugular. I gave myself permission to do it.”

For the Walker site, I wrote an original essay and built it out using our robust new feature template. I asked Szyhalski if he could hand-draw the type for the headline, and he agreed. He also agreed that the Walker Reader could host the entirety of the project: as he completed new works, I updated the slideshow at the end of the feature. I felt a similar kind of responsibility in covering his project as he did in making it:

I really believe that as artists, we need to be doing this. If there is a responsibility, the responsibility is to be there, to witness, and to respond and to reflect what we are experiencing, and unfortunately what we are experiencing has a shitload of hurt.

Read “NO HOLDS BARRED! A Look at Piotr Szyhalski's Daily COVID-19 Reports”