Naming the Lost Memorials was a five-year public art project honoring New Yorkers lost to COVID-19. We began making ephemeral memorials in May 2020 and continued until the end of the project in November 2025. Over the course of the project, over 100 community-based organizations and hundreds of New Yorkers participated in this project. Dozens of ritual makers and performers led us in memorial activation events. Installation teams made up of artists and mourners worked through every kind of weather to design the memorials with our partners.
These archival pages contain a selection of photos, videos, and ephemera from the project. The complete digital archive is housed at City Lore. Please contact our project archivist, Seth Schonberg, for questions about the archive or to arrange a time to view the collection. Seth may be contacted at gro.erolytic@htes or 212-529-1955 x14.
New York Historical has acquired a selection of artwork from the five years of the project. These objects will be preserved for future research. For questions about the objects preserved at NYH, please contact Seth at City Lore.
Click on the buttons above to view documentation of the memorials, organized by year. Each page contains a brief history of the project. We hope that this archive will be helpful to future projects as we continue to mourn all those lost to COVID-19.
