This long paper draws on a collaboration that began in early 2023 between two groups: an interdisciplinary digital humanities research lab at a large public university in the U.S. and a national nonprofit organization, Marked by COVID, dedicated to pandemic remembrance. Drawing on a shared commitment to documenting pandemic history and preserving a digital archive of pandemic stories and art, members of both groups gathered a diverse digital collection of grass-roots, community-sourced artworks and testimonials that demonstrate how everyday creative expression functioned as a coping mechanism during crisis. This collaboration seeks to preserve the cultural memory of the Covid-19 pandemic by offering a space to grieve and engage with the history of medicine to understand how Covid-19 fits into the legacy of past pandemics. At the same time, we approach the pandemic as what Arundhati Roy (2020) describes as “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next,” resisting narratives of return to the “normality” and instead reimagining a new world grounded in creativity, care, and healing.

As part of the multi-year Mellon-funded Just Futures initiative, Creativity in the Time of Covid-19, the lab research team developed an open-source OMEKA archive of pandemic art and storytelling, exploring the shared experiences—and cultural specificity—of creative activity during the pandemic. Collecting over 2,000 submissions from across 16 nations, all shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, the project strove to amplify the voices from historically marginalized communities who faced systemic inequities exacerbated by Covid-19. Each creative work is accompanied by a story of the creator’s experience of Covid-19 and the role creativity played in helping them process the personal and collective trauma.

The national nonprofit partner has similarly brought together a diverse group of scholars, activists, and community members bereaved by Covid to cement the losses of the pandemic in our collective national memory. Their digital project, Memorial Matrix, is a crowdsourced, interactive map and timeline that documents the vast network of community-led Covid Memorials across the United States since the start of the pandemic. By preserving and showcasing records of grassroots memorials, the project acknowledges the importance of spontaneous acts of remembrance, such as community art installations, online memorial pages, virtual vigils, and personal tributes.

Drawing on these two digital collections, the research team curated a series of public art exhibitions between 2023 and 2024 at the University at Buffalo, the United States Air Force Academy, Washington University in St. Louis, Harvard University, and Michigan State University. Across sites, the exhibitions emphasized extensive accessibility resources and alternative sensory modes of interacting with art, foregrounding art’s role in using memory to push back against systemic exclusion and promoting a new standard of accessibility for both digital and physical exhibition spaces. At Harvard, in particular, we worked closely on a two-month exhibition for medical students and practitioners of public health, focusing on creative practices of grief processing. For instance, a featured work of the National COVID Memorial, included an interactive augmented reality installation where audiences used their phones via Snapchat to view personalized tributes to those who lost their lives during the pandemic, written by family and friends. As these virtual tributes spiraled and filled the room, an everyday space turned into a site of memorialization and mourning.

Building on this core knowledge we have gained from our previous collaborative public humanities work, our subsequent project, Art as Medicine, creates an immersive virtual exhibition, developed using a 3D virtual platform Metasteps. This project integrates digital humanities infrastructures with everyday creativity and reflective learning in healthcare education, developing a modular curricular unit that prompts reflection among medical students, residents, and continuing-education participants. Grounded in recent work linking creativity to resilience (De Lorenzo et al., 2023; Capell and Hughes, 2025), the project examines how everyday creative practice fosters healthy expression, emotional processing, and self-efficacy among medical learners. Existing research affirms that creative expression can mitigate burnout and foster wellbeing in healthcare workers; however, traditional artistic interventions are often time intensive, making them difficult for practitioners to sustain in everyday life (Tjasink et al., 2023; Yi et al., 2025). Art as Medicine, on the other hand, focuses on small, everyday creative acts, lowering these barriers and helping healthcare professionals identify and integrate practices that foster groundedness in a demanding field.

With creativity as its centerpiece, Art as Medicine promotes organic, self-initiated engagement within learners’ daily routines. We begin by curating an educational exhibition with selected key artworks and narratives that testify to the myriad ways that everyday acts of creativity became essential for emotional processing during the pandemic. The goal is to see if-and-how a virtual exhibition of others’ everyday artistic practices might help visitors identify their own tools for processing stress and develop sustainable habits for emotional resilience. Visitors, represented by 3D avatars, will explore this virtual exhibition at their own pace and engage with works that resonate with them. Each artifact is accompanied by that creator’s narrative explaining what motivated their creativity and how it helped them cope. To better understand how healthcare practitioners and students currently process distress through everyday creativity, visitors will complete a survey at the end of the exhibition capturing emotional responses, reflections on their own pre-existing practices of everyday creativity, and which new outlets they found inspiring. Over several weeks following the exhibition experience, visitors will be encouraged to document and share their own micro-moments of creativity through a follow-up survey. These submitted examples of everyday acts of creativity will then be incorporated into an expanded digital archive, reinforcing the virtual exhibition as both a portal and a living, participatory space.

Art as Medicine is guided by transformative learning theory, which emphasizes the central role of reflection in processing disorienting experiences and crises (Dirkx, 2006). We also draw on “broaden-and-build” theories of social change to guide communal co-creation of a virtual space dedicated to the everyday, believing it ignites small positive moments that lead to broader change (Fredrickson, 2004). In her book Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (1997), Sturken defines “cultural memory” as “a field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history” (p. 1). As memory scholars, such as Young (2023), have argued, memorials are not static but dynamic processes that reflect shifting social values and collective understandings. These perspectives inform our project by reimagining virtual exhibition as an interactive space where memory is actively reflected and shaped by diverse voices and perspectives.

Art as Medicine, along with Espiritu (2010), sees art as a cultural record of historical moments that reclaims memories that have been pushed to the margins. Crucially, Art as Medicine speaks to the large-scale community justice movements as well as the mental health crises of the 2020s. Our collection addresses how community-generated creative expression enhances inclusive and pedagogically effective digital learning experiences, and ultimately, we aspire to bring these virtual educational models into broader communities, informed by our non-profit partner’s rich knowledge of diverse community-based emotional processing and inclusive memorialization. Along with the virtual exhibition, we will also create open-access resource modules to offer a replicable, equity-oriented model for embedding therapeutic creative practices to be integrated into broader academic curricula and public programs.

With the first stage of Metasteps exhibition scheduled for completion by June 2026, at the ADHO conference, we present preliminary findings from exhibition design, digital accessibility, and pilot engagement data drawn from a Spring 2026 course on art and healing. We not only argue the importance of preserving the pandemic-era archives, but also illustrate how they can become a means of cultivating a virtual space of collective cultural memory—a gateway as Arundhati puts it—that invites critical engagement and imagines a new world. Our goal throughout is to invite conference attendees to our virtual space and elicit conversations on how digital humanities infrastructures can support therapeutic, equity-oriented learning models that honor community memory while fostering individual resilience.