Arina Voronova never considered herself a street artist.

But when the city locked down and got eerily empty in the early days of Covid, she saw an opportunity. She took a photo of a man and woman face to face: their eyes are closed and they're wearing light blue surgical masks. They're kissing. Tenderly. Their pressed mouths flatten the masks' accordion folds and their lips are nearly touching but not quite. She turned the photo in to a poster and started pasting it up around the city.

She said she was trying to send a message. "A direct message to people who live in the city and I wanted this message to spread," she said. The message might seem obvious now but, a year ago, it was striking: We can keep each other safe without losing our humanity. Or as Voronova put it, “We live in a society so we have to wear masks but we are still connected and need to spread kindness.”

She called her project, The Act of Love. 

Over the past pandemic year, New York's walls have seen impassioned calls for justice, dignified paintings of George Floyd, and cries of "vote or die." There was an eerily life-sized cartoon of Donald Trump as the grim reaper, holding a scythe and saying, "Don't be afraid of Covid." But also buoyant masks drawn as boats on choppy seas, ferrying us to safety. And here and there, like talismans, lionized portraits of Doctor Fauci. 

That's normal, says Steve Harrington, co-creator with Jaime Rojo of the influential blog, Brooklyn Street Art. "Street Art holds up a mirror to the city. So it's no surprise that the issue of the day, like Covid or Black Lives Matter, are also reflected in street art."

For more than a year now, street artists have been insisting that, though what's sickening and killing us is invisible, we will still show ourselves. And we will have our say.

Click on the player above for more details of how street artists put their work on walls in response to the pandemic while also spreading it online as never before. Read the full story on Gothamist.