The artist stretched constructs of authority and authorship to impel the viewer’s awareness and participation.
AIDS activism
Posted inArt
Filmmaker Tom Kalin on What It’s Like to Fight for LGBTQ Rights for Decades
“All I felt was fear of dying,” the filmmaker says of the ’80s. Here he looks back on his iconic feature Swoon, working with Gran Fury and ACT UP, and his definition of activism in the Trump years.
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“The AIDS Crisis Is Still Beginning,” Says Artist and Activist Gregg Bordowitz
In a retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, Bordowitz reflects on living as a queer Jewish man with HIV and challenges us to understand the AIDS crisis as both historical and contemporary.
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ACT UP Returns to the Whitney Museum’s Wojnarowicz Retrospective, This Time as Guests
HIV/AIDS activists return to the New York museum, while the museum updated their wall placards to reflect the continuing crisis and the recent action.
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Protesters Stage Intervention at Whitney’s Wojnarowicz Exhibition to Highlight the Enduring HIV/AIDS Crisis
A dozen protesters gathered at the Whitney Museum of Art to condemn the institution’s lack of modern context about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in relation to Wojnarowicz’s artwork.
Posted inArt
Keith Haring and the Artist as Witness
SAN FRANCISCO — At the end of the 2012 documentary How to Survive a Plague, we see a group of ACT UP protestors march on the nation’s capital with the ashes of their dead, a counterprotest to the exhibition of the AIDS Quilt on the Washington Mall.
Posted inArt
Five Years When Silence Equaled Death
Before AIDS activists plastered posters reading “Silence = Death” on New York City walls and ACT UP shouted, “Fight Back, Fight AIDS,” the disease had already claimed the lives of thousands of New Yorkers. The first five years of the AIDS epidemic were characterized by a lack of information about the disease that triggered widespread panic and fear. Focusing on that time, from the appearance of AIDS in 1981 to the death of Hollywood icon Rock Hudson in 1985, which forced the disease into public discourse, the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition AIDS in New York: The First Five Years presents an incredibly important record of both the silence surrounding the growing crisis and the bravery of early activists and caretakers.