‘Not just a number.’ Kentucky art installation will honor 10,000-plus COVID-19 deaths
A Kentucky-born artist has been selected to create a new art installation which will memorialize the 10,000-plus Kentucky residents who have died from COVID-19, Gov. Andy Beshear announced Sunday afternoon.
Amanda Matthews, who runs Prometheus Art Foundry in Lexington, was chosen to create a new monument to “honor the Kentuckians we’ve lost to COVID-19 and the loved ones that are left behind,” Beshear said during a memorial for COVID-19 victims. More than 10,200 Kentucky residents have died from COVID-19, according to numbers from the state Department for Public Health.
“That number is tragic and unthinkable,” Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman said during Sunday’s presentation.
Matthews was selected as the artist by an advisory panel made up of first responders, health care workers and family members of people who died from COVID-19, Beshear’s office said.
Jacqueline Woodward, a health care worker whose husband died from COVID-19, was part of that panel. Her husband, Gary Woodward, was a nurse who treated COVID-19 patients before he got infected. She said during Sunday’s presentation that Kentucky residents who died from COVID-19 are “not just a number.”
“They will never be forgotten, and generations to come will know what we’ve been through” because of the memorial, Woodward said.
The design for the memorial was unveiled Sunday after Matthews was announced as the commissioned artist. The memorial is expected to be installed in the next six months at Monument Park on the state Capitol grounds.
Matthews is from Louisville and studied fine art and philosophy at the University of Louisville, according to her company’s website. She studied art and architecture in Paris, France. In addition to the Kentucky COVID-19 memorial, she’s also working on monuments in New York.
Beshear said Matthews will be able to portray “what we have felt right here in Kentucky” because she’s a Kentucky native. Her design for the monument is titled “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.” It includes visual, audible and tactile elements, Beshear said. It’ll also feature symbolic imagery.
The memorial was made possible by hospital groups who stepped forward as “generous sponsors,” Beshear said. Those sponsors included Norton Healthcare, Baptist Health, St. Elizabeth, King’s Daughters’ Health, UofL Health, UK HealthCare and Pikeville Medical Center. Some of the leaders of those health care systems attended Sunday’s memorial.
Beshear listed and remembered several of the Kentucky residents who’ve died from COVID-19 and were honored by the governor’s office during previous COVID-19 updates.
“Not one of our 120 counties has been left untouched” by COVID-19, Beshear said Sunday.
Beshear announced that Kentucky had reached 10,000 COVID-19 deaths on Nov. 8. Beshear announced the same day that sharp declines in new COVID-19 cases and the state’s positivity rate were starting to plateau.
These metric shifts “suggest to me we’re plateauing,” Beshear said on Nov. 8. “I don’t know if I ought to say there ought to be a wake-up call now because the current trend has [otherwise] been really good. But we need to be cautious, [and] we need to be humble.”
Kentucky has reported nearly 760,000 total COVID-19 cases since the pandemic first reached the state in March 2020, according to state data.
This story was originally published November 14, 2021 at 2:18 PM.