#1 Duluth

 Meeree Villiard is an artist who grew up on Fond du Lac and works with the American Indian Community Housing Organization in Duluth. She’s built  a website featuring downloadable posters, mask designs, and videos all made by and for indigenous people. One of the videos features  a song composed and performed by the Jaakola family. It’s called Couch Potato

One of the posters is a collaboration between Meeree Villiard, a painter named Leah Yellowbird, and photographer Ivy Vainio:

the poster is a, um, if you just two photos of youth connected to AICHO’s housing programming, they're wearing face masks that features sort of a sort of a roaring bear mouth. So it makes it look like the kids are, you know, pretending to be bears. And the mask itself was designed by another artist via Yellow Bird. And then in the center, there's a quote by one of the youth that describes how you know wearing a mask is a way to honor and respect your elders and and protect them from COVID-19.

most, most world languages that you know, most non European languages don't have a word for art. And like when I realized that it was just kind of like, you know, I don't think a lot of the indigenous languages I don't think ojibwe there's a word for art because most cultures don't take art out of lifestyle, like English does.

If you’d like to see or download the coloring books, posters and mask designs, go to AICHO.org and click on artist responses to the pandemic.

#2 Franklin Ave: 

My name is Missy Whiteman, I belong to the Northern Arapaho and Kickapoo nations. And I am here on Franklin Avenue at the library. And we're working on a thank you mural for AIM and for the native community for protecting the avenue.

Missy Whiteman is an award-winning filmmaker and mentor. She is not surprised at the explosion of public art.

Like we we feel like there's more freedom to connect with one another because we've been quarantined. And because of all of the rights like we need human interaction to heal. Like we need it.

the quarantine time was our time together or medicine and it was our time to prepare and to learn to do things differently to reconnect with our families and our children. Learn, like to cook, to cook for our families and to become healthier, you know, physically, mentally, spiritually, and make a stronghold of your family or your loved ones or whoever is around you. And then now is the time where, you know, people are elite are coming out and they're still, you know, becoming a part of a community and creating a larger strongholds.

She too says art is just what the community does:

#3 Q&A

We called on Dr. Nick Lennertz from the Minnesota Department of Health to answer another of your questions about Covid- 19 – this one about the incubation period.

                [cut this down} Yeah, yeah. So incubation period is the time of from exposure to the virus to the time when you become symptomatic, okay. So if you get exposed to a little virus, that virus will have Could be inside of you and replicate or basically make more virus. And it takes time to do that. Right. And so, um, so you may be exposed, let's say at a gathering or a party, or from a family member, and when you're exposed, you don't instantaneously become ill, it takes a little while for that virus to build up to the point where you build up an immune response, which is then put into making symptomatic, that's where you get the fever, and you get that coughing get like maybe, you know, like a little bit of fatigue or or muscle aches. And so um, so the incubation period is that time from the exposure to the virus until the time you become symptomatic. Now Currently, the average incubation period that we're seeing with COVID-19 is right around five to seven days. However, the range of incubation periods that we have seen has been anywhere from two to 12 days. And so erring on the side of caution after an exposure to a known COVID positive case. Okay, so let's say you're at a party and there's an individual there and he's got COVID-19 and you've been exposed to him. That's why the recommendations are to quarantine yourself or stay away from everybody else for 14 days.