Visual AIDS
Since 1988, Visual AIDS has been one of the leading arts organization committed to raising AIDS awareness and fighting stigma. Their aim is to provoke dialogue and support HIV-positive artists by producing and presenting visual art projects, exhibitions, public forums, and publications. Their work preserves and honors the work of HIV-positive artists and other artistic contributions spurred by the epidemic as it preserves the legacy of the epidemic, because as Visual AIDS reminds us, “AIDS is not over.”
To support their efforts, Visual AIDS has collaborated with artists to create posters, buttons, broadsides, safe sex kits, and tote bags, such as the new books featured this year.
Tell Me More: Visual AIDS offers four books this holiday season:
Darrel Ellis, a richly illustrated monograph on Ellis’ expressive transformations of photographic memory, charting his development from figurative painting to photographic experimentation and his later preoccupation with self-portraiture.
DUETS: Julie Ault & David Deitcher in Conversation focuses on William Olander, the influential art historian, New Museum curator, and Visual AIDS co-founder.
Comic Velocity: HIV and AIDS in Comics explores how artists and activists have used comics to create and shape conversations about HIV and AIDS.
DUETS: Frederick Weston & Samuel R. Delany in Conversation, a wide-ranging dialogue, reflecting on their overlapping histories in Times Square, the deep impact of AIDS on their creative practices, and the ever-changing intersections of race, sex, language, and art.
How Much: Darrell Ellis, $49.95; Comic Velocity, $15; both Duets, $10 each.
Who Benefits: Your purchases will help Visual AIDS fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy of HIV-positive artists and those artists whose work responds to the pandemic.
How to Order: For all orders, please go to https://visual-aids.mybigcommerce.com/.
As we approach the holidays near the end of this calamitous year, many of us may struggle to find reasons for celebration. It’s been a challenging year on multiple levels. Climate change set the West Coast on fire, while it drowned the Southeast and Northeast in freakish rainstorms. Even if the effects of climate change haven’t kept us awake at night, we’ve had to cope with the still-spreading, still-deadly COVID-19 crisis (and its accompanying epidemic of disinformation) for nineteen months. And of course these calamities have impacted the HIV community, with reduced HIV testing, the closure of many clinics, and a dangerous drop in funding for HIV/AIDS-related organizations and services.
It’s been an exhausting year.
Perhaps that is why celebrating the holidays this year is so important. For the sake of our sanity, we need some spirited revelry, some levity to light the darkness that has surrounded us. As Jerry Herman wrote for Mame, “For we need a little music, need a little laughter / Need a little singing ringing through the rafter / Yes we need a little snappy happy ever after.” We need the human contact of gathering together, sharing a holiday feast, toasting each other’s health, exchanging gifts.
In our 20th Annual Holiday Gift Guide, you’ll find a wide array of gifts that perform triple duty—they will delight the recipients of your gifts, you will enjoy the spirit of giving, and each gift helps to raise funds for one HIV/AIDS-related organization or another. Greeting cards, jewelry, T-shirts, hats, food stuffs, artwork, holiday ornaments—you name it, you’ll find the perfect gifts here in a broad range of prices.
So be of good cheer! Get out your gift list and get busy spreading love and joy among your friends and family. We sure could use some love and joy these days!
Happy Holidays!
—Hank Trout
Hank Trout, Senior Editor, edited Drummer, Malebox, and Folsom magazines in the early 1980s. A long-term survivor of HIV/AIDS (diagnosed in 1989), he is a forty-one-year resident of San Francisco, where he lives with his husband Rick.
