Fairfax County is one step closer to creating a memorial paying tribute to county residents who died of COVID-19 and honoring the county workers, nonprofit staff, frontline health care providers, and others who contributed to the local response to the pandemic.

ArtsFairfax, the county’s arts organization, announced Monday that it selected two artists to create the permanent memorial: Miriam Gusevich, a Cuban-American environmental artist and architect who has created memorials across the U.S. and internationally, and Salvatore Pirrone, a professor of art and design at Marymount University in Arlington. Both artists are from the D.C. region; Gusevich is a D.C. resident and has taught at Catholic University, and Pirrone lives in Upper Marlboro, Md.

“Art does not cure, yet it can help us heal. Creativity can offer renewal; through it we can nurture faith in the future,” Gusevich said in a statement included in the ArtsFairfax news release.

“We hope to provide an environment that will bring people together. The memorial strives to be a place of reverence for the lives lost and the people who honor them,” added Pirrone.

According to CDC figures, 23,512 Virginians have died from COVID-19. That number includes 1,723 Fairfax residents, per the Virginia Department of Health. The county has seen 5,263 hospitalizations and 266,889 known cases to date from the disease, more than any other locality in the commonwealth. (Fairfax’s death rate is significantly lower than most of the rest of Virginia.)

COVID-19 is still present in the D.C. region, with some indicators suggesting an uptick in cases.

The pandemic response was an all-hands-on-deck effort for the county’s first responders, medical personnel, and public employees, as detailed in the county’s after-action review of the response released in May. Other county staff and nonprofit workers were suddenly responsible for coordinating massive social services programs that sprung up overnight to address the problems created by the crisis.

The county dispersed $65 million in rental assistance alone, rolled out loans and grants for businesses struggling to stay afloat, and ran quarantine hotels for people experiencing homelessness sick with COVID-19. Public health staff put together a complicated vaccination campaign that ultimately dispensed nearly 3 million shots and got 80% of Fairfax residents through the initial course of the vaccine. Workers at the health call center took more than 600,000 calls from the public from early 2020 to the end of 2022.

All of that has added up to exhaustion and burnout among Fairfax workers. Three-fourths of county employees surveyed in the report said their department continues to deal with pandemic-related challenges, with many citing staffing shortages and burnout as key issues affecting their work.

To reflect community losses and hardships, Gusevich and Pirrone are planning to build a 27-foot tall hollow cone out of concrete, with a circular opening at the top. Visitors will be able to sit inside the cone and look up through the opening. The artists are calling the work “Circles of Memory.” It’ll be located in front of Fairfax’s public safety building in Government Center.

The project was chosen unanimously by ArtsFairfax, and it will be a permanent installation. Many COVID memorials in the D.C. region — including a display of hundreds of thousands of flags on the National Mall representing deaths across the country — have been temporary.

There will be opportunities for the public to meet Gusevich and Pirrone to weigh in with experience from the pandemic throughout the process of creating the memorial. The construction of the project is expected to take several months.