Looking at the AIDS epidemic through art
This 20′ by 20′ sculpture titled “andimgonnamisseverybody” was created by Christopher Paul Jordan for the AIDS Memorial Pathway located in Seattle, Washington. Jordan produced the piece to explore the intersections of race and class within the epidemic’s history. Photo courtesy of the AIDS Memorial Pathway.
October 14, 2021
In 1981, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported the first case of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in five previously healthy gay men living in New York City. Despite AIDS being life-threatening, the Reagan Administration did not recognize the cause of the disease nor the ever-mounting death toll until 1985, and it eventually took nine years to report the first 100,000 cases to the CDC, according to the University of California San Francisco. By then, 14,544 people had already died from AIDS-related complications, many of these victims being Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) and LGBTQ+ individuals.
Where the Reagan administration and major health institutions lacked in acknowledging the AIDS crisis, queer artists were earnestly working to draw attention to the issue through their various mediums. The painter Diego Rivera once said in 1935, “the role of an artist is that of the soldier of the revolution.” This succinct statement alludes to the powerful role artists played in the movement against AIDS, and more importantly, it pushes the need for us to begin recognizing the way art has acted as a foundation for resistance against oppressive forces as well as a universal language to share experiences gone untold.
Political art in AIDS activism
American art before the AIDS crisis can be divided into two major branches. One was abstract expressionism, which further expanded on abstract art, and the other was pop art, a playful homage to consumerist culture. Both forms often did not have strong ties to the artists’ personal experiences, but things changed significantly once the AIDS crisis began affecting queer artists personally, whether they witnessed the loss of their family and friends or they were unfortunate to experience the devastating effects of the virus themselves.
The first wave of AIDS activism, as described by Visual AIDS, “fused iconic graphics and dramatic political action” to demand an urgent response from the government and major medical institutions. “He Kills Me” was a 1987 street poster that Texan-born artist Donald Moffett created on behalf of ACT UP (AIDs Coalition to Unleash Power) in memory of his friend, Diego Lopez, who died of AIDS-related complications. Characterized by the phrase “He Kills Me” over a black and white photo of former President Reagan, Moffett used this graphic to both accuse and criticize the Reagan administration for ineffectively responding to the disease. In particular, they were concerned about the administration underfunding AIDS research and obstructing prevention efforts by opposing sex education in schools.
“Silence = Death” was another significant piece produced in 1989 by Keith Haring, who is the artist most often associated with the movement against AIDS because he made it such a prevalent theme throughout his body of work. Created by a six-person collective in New York in 1985, “Silence = Death” acted as ACT UP’s affronting call to action. The group’s manifesto explained, “silence about the oppression and annihilation of gay people, then and now, must be broken as a matter of our survival.” Martine Irvine, founding director and associate professor of Georgetown’s graduate program in Communication, Culture & Technology, described how the work presents us with two trademarks—the slogan in its title and the colored shape in its foreground. During the Nazi regime, the pink triangle had been applied to gay people as a public badge of shame and then as a means of making the deportation process easier. Through Haring’s work, the pink triangle was reclaimed as a pro-gay symbol by activists in the United States in the 1970s. “The symbol of the pink triangle usually turned upright rather than inverted was a conscious attempt to transform a symbol of humiliation into one of solidarity and resistance,” stated ACT UP.
Art was also used as a means of sex education in the early stages of the epidemic as comprehensive education surrounding safe sex was discouraged in schools by the Reagan Administration and instead preached abstinence. Many grew up without understanding the importance of safety precautions, such as communicating the possibility of STIs and/or STDs, like AIDS, with partners and being tested. A survey of the artwork from this period reveals a variety of ways in which the practice of safe sex was shared with the average person. One comic book-style poster created by ACT UP shows Dick Tracy and Clark Kent kissing with the caption reading “Clark Wants Dick, Dick Wants Condoms.” One of the most common slogans on these posters was “Men: Use Condoms or Beat It.”
Masami Teraoka’s “AIDS Series: Geisha in Bath” (1988) as well as the “Tale of Thousand Condoms” series that soon followed used the style of traditional Japanese artwork and ukiyo-e woodblock prints to touch upon taboo subjects—particularly anal sex and condom usage. The first piece shows a geisha, who, comprehending the urgency of the situation, urgently tears open condoms with their teeth in a hurry to protect themselves. This intentional gesture was utilized by Teraoka to further promote condom usage as an integral rather than inconvenient part of safe sex in the midst of the epidemic. His works proved critical in bringing exposure to safe practices of sexual intimacy as well as in fighting against the stigma around sex that was deeply ingrained within the culture at the time.
The art of emotion during an epidemic
The second wave of art surrounding AIDS built upon dismantling the stigma surrounding queer intimacy as it grappled with the grief, rage and fear that ravaged communities of artists, allowing them to both humanize the crisis and shape the cultural perception of HIV/AIDS itself. The dark, tormented oil painting, “Grief,” was produced by Cuban artist Carlos Alfonzo whose work was largely autobiographical, many of his paintings illustrating his struggles with AIDS. Alfonzo painted “Grief” in 1988, three years before his death, as a means to communicate the reality of AIDS and its emotional and physical effects on people.
Hugh Steers’ painting “Two Men and a Woman” made in 1992 served as another grave reminder of the hundreds of thousands of people who died of AIDS, this time told through his own experiences with isolation. The painting depicts a woman bathing a man in a bathtub as another figure assists. The contemporary art gallery Alexander Gray Associates described the piece as “suffused with a tenderness wrought from suffering” with “the composition’s soft light and exaggerated perspective” underscoring the poignancy of the scene as well as the nude man’s vulnerability. Steers died in 1995 at 32 years old, and for the last five years of his life, Steers increasingly concentrated on AIDS in his work, particularly on crafting the essence of mutual care, love and compassion in the midst of the epidemic.
In contrast with the two artists mentioned above, Gregory Russell’s art showcases the other side of grief: anger and rage. His 1992 painting, “Conspiracy”, paints first the image of a casket before a church and an American flag, then juxtaposed images of medical research with dollar signs and lastly, a gas-masked head below a cloud. In this piece, Russell used these opposing images to represent AIDS as a genocide committed against gay communities, honing on the Black experience specifically. His art not only shows how homophobia and racism often overlap with one another in contemporary society but also highlights the roles of the U.S. government, churches and the pharmaceutical industry in furthering this oppression.
Contemporary art against AIDS
Audre Lorde, author, feminist and civil rights activist, stated, “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” When discussing the relationship between the AIDS epidemic and art from the start of the movement to now, people have often looked through a whitewashed lens that lacks queer Black and Indigenous perspectives. AIDS art is queer history, but also Indigenous history, Black history and poor people’s history.
Two-Spirit poet and interdisciplinary artist Storme Webber, curated “In This Way We Loved One Another” as a part of Capitol Hill’s AIDS Memorial Pathway (AMP) in South Seattle to commemorate those of color lost to the crisis. The exhibit displays photos of Reverend Gwen Hall, Patrick Haggerty, Julius J.B. Broughton, P. Catlin Fullwood, Kazaz Jones, Aaliyah Messiah and her sister Sheila Robinson. The late Reverend Hall, specifically, began Sojourner Truth Ministries to provide a spiritual home for Black people with HIV who were ostracized from their own churches or the larger gay community. To represent the queer community in all its fullness and complexity, Webber said in an interview with the Seattle Times, “it is important to create containers which hold all of us, with care.”
The large-scale installation “Andimgonnamisseverybody” was created during the COVID-19 pandemic by Tacoma artist Christopher Paul Jordan, who pulled inspiration from the Bone Thugs-N-Harmony song, “Tha Crossroads,” as a means to pay tribute to the producer Eazy-E who died of pneumonia caused by AIDS. The 20 by 20 feet sculpture formed a large X that evoked imagery of a plus sign, a marker of HIV, tilted to one side. Jordan told the Seattle Times that he wanted to produce a symbol of solidarity between HIV-positive and negative people with this piece. He wants viewers to look deeper into his vision of the work to see how AIDS was and is not an isolated issue but one that intersects with underlying cultural and political issues, such as Reaganomics, mass incarceration and the War on Drugs that make Black communities all the more vulnerable.
The AIDS epidemic had a significant impact on art not only with its content but how it shaped art into a sociopolitical form of protest that sought to convey emotion as well as to empower. In the face of constant dehumanization and systematic inequality, queer artists punctured twisted ideological and political narratives to highlight the reality of the disease as well as the communities of care that grew from it. Even more so, the crisis highlights the need for us, as a society, to begin acknowledging the power art has. Art not only provides objective insight into the forces of oppression at work today, but in many ways, it communicates the very political nature of our lives that we often dismiss. Understanding the ability art has in changing the world around us is critical moving forward as we continue combatting societal issues and work to make the world hold space for all of us.
Do you have any favorite pieces of art used in activism? Let us know in the comments below.
