Devastating, enraging, moving, motivating and yes, militant, Let The Record Show succeeds in powerfully and captivatingly revealing the innumerable and almost incomprehensible losses to the arts community, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as that community’s strong and outspoken response to the crisis. Continue reading
If any photographer, in addition to Wojnarowicz himself, could be said to preserve an alternate history, it would have been Los Angeles-based photographer Albert J. Winn, who sadly passed away this week. Continue reading
Well, welcome to our newest Filthy Dreams series Party Out of Bounds. Do you need a refill? Make sure you grab one before you enter our first Party–The Klaus Nomi Video Lounge! Continue reading
Like Douglas Crimp’s seminal essay, Sean Strub’s Body Counts reflects both mourning and militancy, as well as everything in between, allowing the emotions connected to both queer sexuality and the AIDS crisis to be archived from shame to pride to love to guilt and immense grief. Continue reading
Scrawled in black pen in one of his many journals in the New York Public Library’s exhibition Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism, artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz wrote, “If I die of AIDS, don’t give me a memorial, give me a demonstration.” Continue reading
Last week, the New Museum, in collaboration with Visual AIDS, hosted an engrossing and important panel ACT NOW: Perspectives on Contemporary Performance and HIV/AIDS, tackling questions about the role of performance and the artist’s body in preserving, discussing and embodying the history, legacy and the current AIDS crisis. Continue reading
Visual AIDS and the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History hosted a public forum, (re)Presenting AIDS: Culture & Accountability, to discuss the responsibilities of museums, galleries and other institutions when mounting exhibitions about HIV/AIDS. Organized in part due to Pop Up Museum of Queer History’s Hugh Ryan’s insightful New York Times editorial “How To Whitewash A Plague,” the forum was designed to, as moderator Ann Northrop described, create a space for “productive thinking for future work,” as well as understand the way the community interacts with cultural institutions. Continue reading
Powerfully addressing both loss and its remains, Visual AIDS’s 25th anniversary exhibition Not Over: 25 Years of Visual AIDS at LaMaMa Galleria until June 30 presents art both created in the midst of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s and from the later generation of artists who continue to deal with the losses, memories and ghosts of AIDS. Continue reading