Local artists are finding creative ways to save lives during the pandemic.

Sara Rubin here, wishing that we were way past the need to keep reinventing the public health messaging about Covid-19. But here we are, a year-and-a-half into this pandemic and still exploring ways to help people understand how deadly this virus is, and help us take steps to save lives. Some of the ways public health messaging has happened by now seem intuitive, like the deployment of community health workers pounding the pavement and meeting people at their front doors, in their churches, in farm fields or at the store, in Monterey County’s VIDA Project.

Others get more, well, creative. The California Department of Public Health has added work by fine artists to its repertoire of outreach tools, featuring work by two local artists, Angelica Muro and Hector Dionicio Mendoza, to get the word out on vaccinations, the importance of continued mask-wearing and other Covid-19 health protocols. 

The effort, called “Your Actions Save Lives,” features 18 original temporary public artworks in 15 communities across California. Projects included performances, a zine, billboard displays—different mediums meant to reach audiences that might not be absorbing public health messages elsewhere. “The pandemic isn’t over yet, so we still need to stay vigilant,” Tomás Aragón, Director of the California Department of Public Health and the State Public Health Officer, said in a statement. “It’s critical that we continue to work together to protect our communities.”

Muro and Mendoza’s project is unique to Monterey County, with a focus on the farmworker community, specifically Spanish speakers, and incorporates iconic images from loteria and graphics that look like advertisements commonly seen in Mexican and Central American markets. They designed images, then produced them on 1,000 T-shirts and 5,000 periodicals—and then distributed those in the community. 

Their artwork has messages about social distancing and vaccinations in a fun and accessible format, and also messages of affirmation, like “Eres una estrella de rock!” (“You are a rockstar!”) mixed in. Those phrases, Muro said in a video produced by CDPH about the project, are very deliberate: “These are communities who oftentimes don’t feel valued.”

Beyond designing the art and producing it in take-home formats, Mendoza and Muro also distributed it themselves, becoming something like a community health worker-artist hybrid. They started in King City, then worked their way up to Salinas, and had conversations with people who were proud to have taken the vaccine, and people who were anxious—the whole gamut of experiences, as you might expect. 

It’s art and it’s outreach, but it’s also personal when it’s created by local artists who live here too (Muro lives in Salinas, and Mendoza in Marina). “"It's our people, our community,” Mendoza says. “We have cousins and aunts and uncles who work in the fields,” he told CDPH. “It really hit home. Both of us have family members who passed away from Covid.”

It’s a reminder that there is still grieving to be done, even as the pandemic continues. And thank you to these artists for finding a creative way to save lives, even amid their own loss.