Art exhibit documents the Covid-19 vaccine experiences of Black Vermonters

CHARLOTTE — Samirah Evans hates needles. So she wasn’t thrilled when she saw on TV the first folks receiving the Covid-19 vaccine in December 2020.

“That needle looks long and it made me nervous,” she outlines in an audio account that is now a part of a storytelling project by Clemmons Family Farm capturing the range of reactions of Black and African American Vermonters during the early rollout of the vaccine.

Funded by the Vermont Department of Health, the exhibit includes original stories, songs, poems and visual art by 30 Black Vermont residents and three white health providers who administered the vaccine in its early days.

As the pandemic wreaked havoc in the early months of 2020, Evans, a Black musician in Vermont, recalls her horror at the passing of a colleague, followed by the father of an acquaintance, followed by musicians in New Orleans, both Black and white.

Until her cousin got rushed to the hospital critically ill from the virus, most of her family members had refused to take the vaccine. “Because for decades African Americans have been used for experiments that led to death. And many of us are marginalized in various ways when it comes to having access to proper health care and nutrition,” she said.

Evans understood the lack of trust in the government and health care system, but she also saw the pandemic did not discriminate — that people of all races were dying alone and so fast that timely burials were difficult.

“So how did I feel about taking the vaccine? Absolutely 100% ready, in line to take one for the sake of humanity,” she continues in her account. “And yes, it helps that a female African American scientist Kizzy Corbett was on the front lines of developing the Moderna vaccine.”

Evans is among the artists participating in the “Beneath Our Skin” exhibit, which opened last month and is now on display at the Clemmons Family Farm in Charlotte, the South Burlington Public Library, the Root Social Justice Center in Brattleboro, the University of Vermont’s College of Nursing and Health Sciences and online .

Her contribution is a song titled “The proof is in the pudding”:

But when we hit the million mark

So many were still in the dark

More lives lost than World War II

Yet there is something that we can do
It’s time to let go of the fears

Stop watching those around us disappear

Find the courage to protect yourself

Save another’s life
Don’t let one more life perish

Consider the lives that you cherish

This is a shared responsibility

The proof is in the pudding.

Disparate outcomes

The global pandemic threw into light the disparate health treatments and outcomes of marginalized communities nationwide. In an effort to counteract that, the Vermont Professionals of Color Network helped to create the Vermont Health Equity Initiative in the spring of 2021, to promote Covid vaccine clinics for Black people, Indigenous people and people of color, giving them a chance to get to the head of the line.

The BIPOC community is growing in the nation’s second-whitest state, but Black people make up a mere 1.4% (about 8,000 people) of Vermont’s population, up from 1% in 2010, according to the 2020 census.

According to the health department’s Covid data , white Vermonters ages 5 and above recorded the highest updated booster rate at 34%, while Black Vermonters have lagged at 17%.

All but two of the Black Vermonters who participated in the “Beneath our Skin” project were vaccinated (booster shots were not available at the time); 12 were from the U.S., nine were from East Africa and one was from the Pacific Islands, according to a report compiled by the Clemmons Family Farm in March.

The key lessons from the project include the need to develop restorative interventions to address mistrust in government and public health systems, which, the report notes, is more prevalent among U.S.-born Black people, and improve communication about the virus and the vaccine, according to the report. Black Vermonters who participated expressed a strong desire for bodily autonomy, and the project found that family members’ experience strongly influenced vaccine decisions. It also noted that transportation and weather posed barriers to accessing the vaccine.

The storytelling project, conducted at the height of the pandemic, is an effort to highlight and learn from the Black experience and “help build a shared understanding of needs and perceptions related to improving Covid-19 vaccination access and uptake,” states a release from the Clemmons Family Farm, one of Vermont’s few historic African American-owned farms.

It is also an effort by the health department to generate “qualitative data about vaccine acceptance and hesitancy, and about health provider care-giving attitudes and practices” that may improve future vaccine behaviors of Black Vermonters.

The exhibit

The nonprofit collected stories of Black Vermonters who were fully, partially or not at all vaccinated against Covid-19 between October 2021 and December 2022. Curated by Yanna Marie Orcel, a wellness arts adviser at the farm, the exhibit includes three collections:

— 13 stories from Black Vermonters and three anonymous white vaccine providers who gave the vaccine to Black clients around Chittenden County

— 7 Black residents sharing their stories anonymously over the phone with a trained facilitator

— 10 stories from members of the Vermont African-American/African Diaspora Artists Network beyond Chittenden County.

Last Thursday, Orcel walked through the Charlotte exhibit — housed in what was once a blacksmith’s shop on the farm.

She pointed out quotes displayed on one wall to show the gamut of reactions — from fear and mistrust to relief and gratitude. They are printed in red on cards modeled after the vaccination cards issued during the pandemic. Many of them refer to the infamous syphilis experiment on Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, in which human subjects were offered free food and checkups, but never told that they were part of a study in which medical treatment would be withheld.

The idea of the Vermont project was to get people to not only remember what happened but also to get them to think differently, explained Orcel, who has a background in art therapy. “Since the arts are known to support public health and mental health and well being, it’s a perfect integration,” she said.

Robin Anthony Kouyate, a member of the farm’s board and a senior adviser on the larger “How Are We Doing?” project of which this exhibit is a part, said the exhibit is intended to “really bring to light some of the attitudes and the perspectives of Black and white Vermonters.”

A public health-trained social and behavioral scientist, Anthony Kouyate said the stories definitely spark “some uncomfortable conversations” but her favorite aspect is that art was used as a way of collecting data.

Recalling her own experience, Orcel said she was terrified being in Massachusetts when the pandemic began in 2020. Curating the exhibit brought back the fear of crowds, the inability to go out without a mask, the hoarding of toilet paper — things people have already begun to forget about, she said.

Light blue face masks, ubiquitous during the height of the pandemic, were pinned around the room.

One of the displays — the outline of a pink human head filled with colorful words and a black spiky virus superimposed in the middle — represents a word cloud generated from the audio transcripts of all the stories, Orcel said. “Freedom,” “Tuskegee,” “white folks” and “choice” loom in large letters, representing the words that came up the most.

The project shows that Black Vermonters are a complex group that didn’t feel one way about the vaccine, said Orcel.

Orcel hopes the display will help “inform Vermont’s public of how Black Vermonters actually felt and to contextualize it so that the general public can understand more about why Black Vermonters were hesitant.”

“I would like this exhibit to also serve as a way for Black Vermonters to feel seen, represented, heard and understood and for their voices to be amplified in the realm of public health, which they usually are not,” Orcel said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Art exhibit documents the Covid-19 vaccine experiences of Black Vermonters .