When artist Jill Magid was asked to do a public art work for the non-profit Creative Time in 2020, she had to take a step back.

"It's very hard to make a public art piece when there's no public and there's a pandemic," she said.

But then she read a New Yorker article, where the co-chief investment officer at the bond fund PIMCO, Mohamed El-Erian, said this about the pandemic economy:

The body was already so fragile. Those were the words that stuck in Magid's head.

Her project, called Tender, took shape. She had 120,000 pennies inscribed with that phrase, and distributed them through New York City's bodegas, locally-owned convenience stories which were considered essential businesses when the city was shut down in the early stages of the pandemic. She also made a short film with a provocative set of images, juxtaposing Brink's trucks filled with pennies with rows of refrigerated trucks filled with bodies. It's saying the economy is sick; our bodies are sick, too.

Many of the film's close-ups are of hands as the coins pass from clerk to customer. It is both frightening and intimate, reminding us that pennies circulate through our economy like the virus circulates - through contact.

This weekend is the second - and final - time audiences can view the film. It's showing at Dime Savings Bank in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a neo-Classical building that was once a cathedral of capitalism and is now all peeling paint and hollow, echoing spaces. At set times, eight musicians play the score to the otherwise mostly-silent film, their droning music recalling both the horror of that time and the meditative quality of religion, of reflection. It was important to Magid that there be a place, a time, for people to reflect on all that's happened over the past two years, especially in the place that was originally the virus's epicenter.

To read the complete article, see:
She inscribed 120,000 NYC pennies with a pandemic message. Is one in your pocket?(https://www.npr.org/2022/05/05/1096310474/120k-of-these-pennies-are-in-circulation-do-you-have-one-in-your-pocket)

To read the earlier E-Sylum articles, see:
TENDER: AN EDGE-LETTERED CENT ART PROJECT(https://www.coinbooks.org/v23/esylum_v23n40a24.html)
NOTES FROM E-SYLUM READERS: OCTOBER 25, 2020 : More on Tender, the Edge-Lettered Cent Art Project(https://www.coinbooks.org/v23/esylum_v23n43a12.html)