Earlier this year, Tomer Hanuka, a teacher at the School of Visual Arts in New York, decided to give his students an intriguing task. He asked them to come up with a faux cover on the subject of post-pandemic for The New Yorker magazine.
The art students had to go through the entire semester virtually, so Hanuka was looking to “send them off in a positive state of mind.” The entire project took three weeks to complete, from initial sketches to final art, and the results were so impressive that Hanuka shared them on his Twitter profile.
Hanuka wanted to award his students and their hard work, but the result was better than he ever could imagine. It didn’t take long for social media users to begin noticing faux covers and the artworks soon went viral. Hanuka’s original post amassed 132k likes while being retweeted more than 35k times.
“They were asked to find logic in the chaos—to make sense of it, by way of beauty,” Hanuka told The Washington Post. “They practiced their craft rigorously and showed up. And they delivered.”
The students took different approaches to the task.
The work of Vancouver-native Amy Young dealt with the consequences of the pandemic, showing a family at the dinner table with an empty chair that represents the recently deceased matriarch.
Ruoxi Jiang’s cover, on the other hand, shows a family enjoying a picnic and sends a hopeful projection of people being able to resume their everyday lives soon.
Check out all the covers below.
Zoe Stengel
Milly Wen
Penni Xiaoyi Peng
Lauren V
Yijun Cai
Yushan Zhou
Ruoxi Jiang
Katrina Catacutan
Jungwoo Lee
Jane McIlvaine
Huahua Cui
Jiaci Grace Qiu
Fan Zhang
Dou Hong
Chenmiao Shi
April Xinyu Chen
Amy Young
