A Wonderful Plague

Artist Statement A Wonderful Plague

A Wonderful Plague was created in direct response to the COVID 19 pandemic in the months of March and April of 2020.

On March 17th, fear about the spreading virus in America was reaching a fever pitch; schools and businesses everywhere were closing. In the space of 24 hours, Stephen traveled from Vermont to Massachusetts and back to find and photograph a Smallpox cemetery he had heard rumors about.

Eve then researched the long history of plagues and their intersection in this particular geographic area.

The resulting six panels pair text with photographic imagery from Provincetown, Massachusetts – a site repeatedly afflicted by pandemics of history, from smallpox and leptospirosis brought by the earliest European traders and fishermen, to the "hidden" pandemic of HIV/AIDS that hit communities like Provincetown especially hard, to the Coronavirus of today.

Hand-inscribed over and around the images are quotes, statistics, comments, facts and myths exploring the intersection of crisis, disease, and power. The fact that A Wonderful Plague lists 146,000 deaths from Coronavirus acts as a time stamp for the creation of the work (as of Oct. 13 the worldwide death toll stood at 1.08 million.)

The title A Wonderful Plague comes to us from a phrase found in the 1620 charter of New England, pointing to the idea that a divine hand had removed the native inhabitants through plague deliberately, in preparation for the arrival of the pilgrims.

Man always looks for meaning in times of crisis. Who controls the narrative of disease? Who decides the meaning of a pandemic?