Photopress art takoma5/17/2023 ![]() "Art AIDS America" is certainly not the first exhibit to feature art related to AIDS. ![]() Visual AIDS commissions artists to design such items, both creative and practical, to serve as AIDS awareness materials. The display includes a tote bag, stickers, pins, broadsides and "trading cards," which the organization packages as safer sex kits with condoms and lube. ![]() Just a few steps from the stack of Trojan boxes is a vitrine full of objects from Visual AIDS, a New York-based organization that supports HIV-positive artists and uses art to fight AIDS. Adam Rolston's 1991 Trojan Boxes is a stack of cardboard boxes, reminiscent of Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes, but the description of the latex condoms is slightly tweaked to read, "For your protection during anal and vaginal intercourse," rather than only the latter. The last work Keith Haring finished before his death, "Altar Piece," is a triptych made of bronze with white gold-leaf patina, showing a mother holding a baby and crying oversized tears that fall onto a crowd of Haring's iconic cartoon-like figures. In Martin Wong's painting, Iglesia Pentecostal Mansion de Luz, a storefront church is shuttered with gates and padlocks. There is Judy Chicago's Homosexual Holocaust, Study for Pink Triangle Torture, which incorporates the Nazi symbol for gay men in concentration camps, scenes of agony and mutual support and textbook illustrations of Kaposi's sarcoma. ![]() Some of the works document the outward manifestations of HIV/AIDS-such as a trio of self-portraits by Mark Morrisroe showing the artist's gaunt body slouched against a wall or on a bed, or holding an IV pole with a hospital gown hanging open around his shoulders. Andres Serrano/Tacoma Art Museum/Bronx Museum of the Arts Diverse artwork The photographs, paintings, prints, sculptures, videos and mixed-media pieces represent a huge range of ways HIV/AIDS can figure into visual art, from literal to abstract, from explicit to interpreted.Īndres Serrano, "Blood and Semen III," 1990. This question reflects a striking feature of a show that contains more than 125 works. Roughly 10 years in the making, Katz considers it a chance to ask "why so much art about AIDS doesn't look like art about AIDS," he tells Newsweek. This exhibition demonstrates the deep and continued impact of the AIDS crisis." "For too long, we have considered art about AIDS as a tragic, closed chapter in the history of American art. "'Art AIDS America' aims to abolish the silence about the pervasive presence of HIV/AIDS in American art," reads the first line of the exhibit description, printed high on a white wall in the lobby of the Bronx Museum. It will be on display in New York through September 25, and will open at Chicago's newly built Alphawood Gallery on World AIDS Day in December.įor Katz, director of the Visual Studies Doctoral Program at the University at Buffalo, the exhibit is an opportunity to rectify what he considers a failure of the art world-museums, galleries, collectors and art publications-to engage with the subject when the crisis was at a high point and to examine the influence of the AIDS epidemic on American art. The traveling exhibition, originally co-curated by Rock Hushka and Jonathan David Katz for the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington, recently made a stop at Kennesaw State University's Zuckerman Museum of Art near Atlanta and opened to the public Wednesday at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. They are trying to make the multitude and diversity of art about HIV/AIDS visible and to remind visitors that the disease had, and continues to have, a profound influence on American society and culture. The curators of "Art AIDS America" want to bring discussions of the epidemic into the present, and into bright and shiny museum spaces they say don't normally rush to embrace topics such as death, disease and sexuality.
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