Trace: A Memorial, an interactive installation created by oral historian and multidisciplinary artist Nyssa Chow, opened on May 28, 2025, at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy.
The permanent memorial pays tribute to the essential workers who lost their lives at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. “The piece involves one hundred names of these workers, each complemented by a dedicated phrase about the worker shared by their loved ones,” according to the exhibition website.
Chow was a visiting lecturer in the Humanities Council and the Program in Humanistic Studies in 2023-24 and 2024-25 and served as a 2019-21 Princeton Arts Fellow in the Lewis Center for the Arts. Most recently, she co-taught the Fall 2024 undergraduate course “Arts in the Invisible City: Race, Policy, Performance” with D. Vance Smith (English). The HUM course, which is also part of the Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship (ProCES), fulfills the “Engaged or Public Humanities” cluster of the new minor in humanistic studies.
Read more about the exhibition on the CUNY School of Public Health website.
Read more about the “Arts in the Invisible City” course on the University homepage.
