Mapping Palo Alto Together:
A Public Installation

I moved from New York to California in 2019. Before I could build a new community, the pandemic arrived and everyone disappeared behind closed doors. I am an intensely social person, and creating this public artwork became a way to process that isolation and connect with the people around me.

​

During seven workshops, residents traced their daily routes and color-coded them by day of the week, first under pandemic restrictions and then as those restrictions lifted. As people mapped, they shared stories. One woman cried while recalling her return to the farmers market; teenagers described spending nine hours a day attending school online.

​

I scanned and wove their drawings into one communal artwork. Their individual movements became a shared record of isolation, reconnection, and how the pandemic reshaped our experience of place and one another.