AIDS and visual art are inextricably linked. From the searing images of David Wojnarowicz to ACT UP’s powerful SILENCE = DEATH campaign and the countless lives memorialized by the National AIDS Quilt, art has been used as a call to arms and means of comfort for an entire generation impacted by the disease.

Join the Artists Archives on Wednesday, October 6th for ART + AIDS, a virtual panel discussion exploring the relationship between creative expression and the AIDS epidemic, including the ability of art to raise awareness, enact social change, and provide pathways to healing. Moderated by historic LGBTQ+ activist Martha Pontoni, the panel includes CONVERGE exhibiting artists Gil Kudrin and M. Carmen Lane, as well as Daniel Marcus, co-curator of the pivotal Art After Stonewall exhibition.

“The reason AIDS had such a good PR campaign was because it had to,” panelist and long-term AIDS survivor Gil Kudrin explains. “Because no one was paying attention. It was get noticed or die… so we demanded it.” In the words of Gran Fury, ACT UP’s infamous graphic design collective, art was a powerful means to “get drugs into bodies,” which through unapologetic advocacy and sheer tenacity, is precisely what it did.

The panel will also discuss the regional impact of AIDS, and the response of Ohio artists to the epidemic. As Daniel Marcus describes, “while the role of artists as AIDS activists features centrally in histories of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the story is almost always told—not unjustly—with New York and San Francisco as its focal points. Through my curatorial work on Art after Stonewall, I became interested in exploring alternative legacies of ‘cultural activism’ rooted in and around Central Ohio.”

As recently as 2017, Cuyahoga County had some of the highest new HIV diagnosis rates in the country, with gay/bisexual men of color contracting the disease at twice the rate of their white peers[1]. Panelist M. Carmen Lane, a socially engaged artist, educator and consultant has experienced first-hand the impact of AIDS on the region, including on the African American LGBTQ+ community. Lane describes, “I was born in 1975, by age ten I was acutely aware that the environment that I lived in didn’t like people like me because of the intersections of my race and gender…By my twenties my awareness expanded—that human beings with social group identities labeled marginal by society made one vulnerable to infection and targeted for being HIV positive by the very system that put you at risk. I’m almost fifty and these conditions still exist.”

[1] AIDSVu, 2021

An audience Q&A will follow the presentation. To attend the free program, REGISTER ON ZOOM

Photo Credit: The National AIDS Memorial