Activism, Art, and the HIV/AIDS Crisis

by Michael A. Jones

categories: HIV/AIDS, LGBT Education, LGBT Health Care, LGBT History

Published August 20, 2009 @ 05:23PM PT

How do you commemorate the fear, anger, hope, challenges, activism, and organizing that occurred at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the U.S. more than twenty years ago?  If you're the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, you host a whole semester's worth of programming and exhibits looking at the impact that groups like ACT UP had, and the vivid images that captured the country's attention and changed the way that HIV/AIDS was viewed.

Before there was social networking, there was guerilla marketing.  And as the Carpenter Center points out, that tactic was deployed quite effectively by ACT UP, as well as artist collectives like Gran Fury, the Silence = Death Project, and Fierce Pussy (to name a few).  These groups used the power of art to fight against HIV/AIDS, and specifically to fight against government inaction and stereotypes that made up the early history of the disease in this country. Whether it was explaining that kissing doesn't cause HIV/AIDS, or whether it was telling the Catholic Church that condoms protect against sexually-transmitted diseases, these orgs put their artwork where their politics were, so to speak.

"ACT UP’s demonstrations in the late 1980s and early 1990s reflected the group’s outrage against a governing establishment that ignored HIV/AIDS as a national health crisis; that failed to secure funding for medical research, treatment, and education; that profited from inflated costs for therapeutic drugs; and that perpetuated homophobic misrepresentations of HIV and AIDS," writes the Carpenter Center.

The exhibit itself?  Well, it'll feature classic ACT UP advertising campaign posters, as well as a suite of over 100 video interviews with surviving members of ACT UP New York.  Those interviews form the crux of an oral history project that captures a diverse movement birthed during the darkest days of HIV/AIDS.  These are the organizers and activists who "transformed entrenched cultural ideas about homosexuality, sexuality, illness, health care, civil rights, art, media, and the rights of patients," and made the world a little - scratch that, a lot - better for everyone fighting against the disease.

In other words, the exhibit at the Carpenter Center will pull together some of the best social artwork of the last thirty years: the artwork and ad campaigns that helped end misinformation about HIV/AIDS, that brought about new strategies of political organizing, and that helped give voice to those living with HIV/AIDS.  Better yet, it should help draw the connections between the organizing and activism at the height of the 1980s, and how lessons learned during that movement can be applicable now.