Learning from the Past
Multimedia artist Stephen Mead talks about his new CD, Threnody for a Forgotten Plague by Alina Oswald
Some paint with light. Others use words. Stephen Mead does both. A multimedia artist and author known for his color collages and poems, Mead recently added music and sound to give new life to his work. The result is his new CD, Threnody for a Forgotten Plague, a collection of sung poems of lament dealing with the pain, suffering and loss brought by the early days of the AIDS pandemic.
Being familiar with Mead’s visual artwork and books, I could only wonder about his decision of working with music. So I gave him a call to find out.
“It had a long time in hibernation, before I actually worked out the guts to give it a shot,” Mead says, explaining that the idea for Threnody started several years ago, when he was asked to record a few of his poems for a radio station. To make it more interesting, Mead tried to record his poems using music as background. But, as he opened his manuscripts to select the poems, he remembered how he’d first heard the verses, being sung, in his mind.
It took Mead several more years to turn the idea of recording his poems as songs into reality. At first, he would approach musicians and vocalists to sing his poems. When nobody showed interest, Mead decided to do it himself. So, he began the long process of finding free sounds and music, and pairing them with his poems.
“That took a lot of listening,” Mead says. “It’s like when I worked in a collage medium, [and] placed the colors next to each other to see if they worked together. I would just do it with sounds. I love music, and painted a lot [while listening to] music.”
Mead considers Threnody a work-in-progress. The CD is an emotional exploration, a compilation of poems written before the advent of HAART regimens, some verses inspired by his work in the hospital, as a caregiver for HIV patients.
“Love ballads are some of my favorite pieces,” Mead comments, talking about Threnody songs. “‘Buddy [for Leonard Matlovich]’ is one of my favorites, dealing with a war veteran. I think I was listening or reading an article about this veteran. He had lost a lover…this was before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, when people could still be discharged [outright].” Another track, “He Fills the Window,” is a love song that takes the listener to the early days of the epidemic, and to the pain associated, then, with an HIV-positive diagnosis.
Track 13, “Building Immunities,” was recently awarded top prize in the poetry category for this magazine’s annual Christopher Hewitt Award and was featured in the August 2014 issue. Here is an excerpt:
Forgetting regret,
in depths of slumber I dreamed,
river-willed, stirring stillness:
you again, you—
But time has changed the face of AIDS. Today, we may find ourselves caught between a painful past, defined by the plague of the early eighties, a present marked by undetectable status and functional cures, and an optimistic future of a generation free of AIDS. So maybe it’s only normal to question the importance of keeping that past alive.
Stephen Mead believes that it is important to remember the history of AIDS, as it is important to remember any aspect of history, including the long and ongoing fight for equal rights. “When I first came to terms with being a gay person,” he says, “I’d done a lot of reading. I think it’s important to know what others went through in order for me to have the privileges I have now, [when] gay marriages are becoming more prevalent.” Same goes for the AIDS pandemic. It is important to remember, so that it’s not repeated. “Even though we have these new ways of treating AIDS, of living with AIDS [today],” he adds, “and we should be thankful for it, [AIDS] is still a serious condition. It hasn’t gone away.”
Metamorphoses
Award-winning fine art photographer Kurt Weston uses art as a “trans-portal” between a pre-AIDS past and a post-AIDS future by Alina Oswald Rainbow, recreated 2013, photo illustration, dimensions variable
A generation unaware of a time without AIDS may find it difficult to imagine what life was like before the cataclysm of AIDS. In the same time, it may find it easier to envision the possibility of a post-AIDS world. Today we live in a now when boundaries between disciplines blur into one, when art, science, and technology blend together to help us embrace futuristic ideas that might possibly pave the way toward an AIDS cure, while keeping alive a past worth remembering. As it often happens, art stands at the core of this new blend of fields, sandwiched between technology and science, a visionary link between two sides of the reality. And that’s just fine, because art is often referred to as a vehicle that transports us to a universe of our dreams, to a place that fuels our imagination.
A generation unaware of a time without AIDS may find it difficult to imagine what life was like before the cataclysm of AIDS. In the same time, it may find it easier to envision the possibility of a post-AIDS world. Today we live in a now when boundaries between disciplines blur into one, when art, science, and technology blend together to help us embrace futuristic ideas that might possibly pave the way toward an AIDS cure, while keeping alive a past worth remembering. As it often happens, art stands at the core of this new blend of fields, sandwiched between technology and science, a visionary link between two sides of the reality. And that’s just fine, because art is often referred to as a vehicle that transports us to a universe of our dreams, to a place that fuels our imagination.
Award-winning, fine art photographer Kurt Weston [A&U, November 2005] sees art as “something that takes you out of your zone, and puts you into another Targeted Treatment (Bull’s Eye), recreated 2014, photo illustration, dimensions variable. This image is appearing in the “Art of Stem Cells” at OCCCA.
kind of reality. Art helps you perceive new things in the world, and [makes you] think about the world in a completely different way,” he tells me over the phone, adding that what he’s seeing nowadays, at least in fashion magazines, doesn’t take him anywhere anymore.
A Chicago native living in California, Weston was a fashion photographer during the eighties and early nineties. Diagnosed with AIDS in 1991, he lost most of his eyesight to CMV retinitis, only a few years later. But, instead of giving up, he relearned how to photograph the world using special devices, and became an award-winning photographer.
I’ve always been intrigued by Weston’s black-and-white body of work that he may be best known for—his “Blind Vision” series of self-portraits, which deals with his loss of eyesight; “Silhouettes and Shadows” series, which is inspired by Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and captures the pre-HAART years of the pandemic; and his “Hearts of a Silent Age” series that explores “the concept of longevity, and the process of aging.” These bodies of work are dark, edgy, emotionally draining, and, most recently, a reason for Weston to lighten, if only so slightly, his artistic approach to dealing with the concept of HIV/AIDS.
Hence, his recent “Fashion Aesthetic” series of fashion images, through which he brings back a certain type of aesthetic and feeling about the fashion and window design of the eighties, now seemingly lost to the pandemic, together with the creative minds behind this aesthetic. He finds it refreshing working on his “Fashion Aesthetic” body of work. “I’ve found joy in creating images that are a little bit more on the lighter side,” he explains, “while still coming from the understanding that it’s paying a tribute to this creative genius that existed pre-AIDS in the artistic world.”
Living in Chicago in the mid-eighties, Weston would walk by amazing urban, cosmopolitan retail stores—Marshall Field’s (bought by Macy’s), Lord & Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue—that had the most incredible people working in their window design department. “You couldn’t help but stop and be completely fascinated by these amazing creations of window displays that were being generated by amazing gay window designers,” he recalls. “And I noticed that after the AIDS epidemic killed most of the people…things changed. Everything just became sort of…blend[ed]. I think that a lot of these people—and an entire generation of creative and artistic minds, illustrators, photographers, fashion designers—ended up dying of AIDS-related causes, and a lot of the imagination and intensity that these window designers had generated was lost. So, with this work, I wanted to revitalize that sort of drama that fashion generates…and kind of take it into something new and exciting.”
Some images from the “Fashion Aesthetic” series, like Pearl or Suede, are original fashion images capturing beautiful, dignified and unassuming glamour. Rainbow is a runway shot. “You can’t tell from the photograph,” Weston explains, “but when I photographed that model, we used fans underneath the dress, to help balloon up the dress.”
Suede, circa 1989, photography (from color transparency film), dimensions variable
In images like Ultra and Phase 267 Weston recreated the airbrush painting look created by Chicago artist, Ed Paschke. “That’s not to be confused with the way image airbrushing was being done back in the day of film,” Weston says, “[when] we would send away the photographs to retouchers, and they would airbrush the images like you do in Photoshop now, to get rid of blemishes.” Ed Paschke was different. He actually painted with an airbrush paint device over the photograph, and that’s the effect that Weston tries to recapture in some of his work.
Two other images are being featured in “The Art of Stem Cells,” a SciArt exhibit displayed at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (OCCCA) in Santa Ana, California. Coming from the idea that in Leonardo da Vinci’s time there was no difference between artist and scientist, SciArt is a new art movement, better defined as an entire new culture that blends together and erases the boundaries between art, science, and technology. For “The Art of Stem Cells,” the curator paired up artists with researchers and scientists from the Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center at UCI, in order to work together…hence, works like Weston’s Targeted Treatment (renamed Bull’s Eye for Weston’s website) and World View came to life.
The researcher with whom the photographer ended up working was trying to create stem cells that would help regenerate the retina. The procedure would require the stem cell to be injected directly into the eye, to attach to, and thus, regenerate, the already existing, yet damaged retina. Weston’s Targeted Treatment offers a metaphorical take on this procedure, portraying a woman with a bull’s eye sign partially covering her face, and a dart sticking out of her eye.
World View has a multi-layered symbolism capturing the promise of a cure for the world, a promise made possible by the use of stem cells. The subject World View, recreated 2014, photo illustration, dimensions variable. This image is appearing in the “Art of Stem Cells” at OCCCA.
in the image holds a small planet Earth in front of her eye. To the photographer, the planet also represents the stem cell that’s going into his eye, regenerating his own CMV-damaged retina. “And because it could be a stem cell or a planet,” Weston says, “to me, it represents the optimism of what stem cell treatment could have for the entire world.”
Some other images, like Zap! or Trans-portal, have a science fiction, futuristic, Star Trek kind of feel, resembling something we would see in the eighties’ window displays. To accomplish this look, Weston has changed the backgrounds, and added artifacts.
“I like things that take you out of the normal context, and make you see things in a different way,” he says, when I inquire about his fascination with science fiction. “To me, there is so much happening in the world today that is very much sci-fi. Even the stem cells show is very science fiction, when you think that the stem cells that are being created are transforming the future of mankind, [in terms of] how people will be healed.”
He continues by explaining that the future is happening right before our eyes, and that things we first envision in our science fiction reality end up becoming reality. In many ways, science fiction is prophetic, and the younger generation today is very much in tune with it.
With his “Fashion Aesthetic” work, Weston is also trying to inspire a younger audience that finds this kind of work appealing, because he doesn’t believe that creativity is dead, but just needs to be woken up. “I think that people need to be a little less conservative and more evocative with what they choose to create; more daring, creative and imaginative with their work, to bring back that energy that we had back in the mid-eighties. It is possible,” he says. “Just because some of the more creative genius was lost to the epidemic, it doesn’t mean that it’s the end of more exciting art. I think that we can still generate that kind of work, and it would be nice to see the younger generation be inspired to do that.”
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Contact Kurt Weston at www.kurtweston.com. To find out more about his Fashion Aesthetics body of work, please visit www.fashionaesthetic.com. More information about Orange County Center of Contemporary Art and The Art of Stem Cells show is available at www.occca.org.
The New-York Historical Society Mounts a New Exhibition that Looks at AIDS in New York by Alina Oswald
A group advocating AIDS research marches down Fifth Avenue during the 14th annual Lesbian and Gay Pride parade in New York, June 27, 1983. Mario Suriani/Associated Press
A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history,” Mahatma Gandhi once said. Over the years, AIDS has had its own determined spirits. They were the AIDS activists. Perhaps it comes to no surprise that when talking about AIDS activism today, many refer to the beginning of the epidemic and the very first AIDS activists to fight for their lives, demonstrating, demanding treatments, thus breaking the deadly silence surrounding the disease at the time. The question is: Where are the determined spirits, the AIDS activists of today?
The last three decades have slightly changed the way we look at and approach topics surrounding the pandemic. AIDS is not an “immediate death sentence,” but rather a “manageable illness.” Patients don’t always die from AIDS-related complications; they live active lives, while living with the virus. Even more, lately there’s been a lot of talk about “the end of AIDS” and an “AIDS-free generation” being within our reach.
And yet, looking at the modern-day AIDS awareness—or lack thereof—some may question the necessity of AIDS advocacy altogether, while others may feel the need to re-enable the early AIDS activism to help, yet again, break down the present complacency associated with the epidemic. Lee Snider. [First AIDS Memorial Service in New York City, Central Park Bandshell], June 13, 1983. Lee Snider/Photo Images; courtesy of the Fales Library & Special Collections, NYU
AIDS in New York: The First Five Years, a new exhibit opening June 7 at the New-York Historical Society, revisits the first five years of the
epidemic, focusing on the impact of AIDS in New York City during the eighties and, subsequently, the nineties. “We are very aware that just at a point when AIDS is in the paper nearly every day and there’s a possibility of a vaccine, many people simply do not remember the beginnings of the disease,” curator Jean Ashton explains. She is the Executive Vice President and Library Director of the New-York Historical Society.
In the past several years, the Society has focused several exhibitions on the relationship between disease and society. “It’s the historical interest,” Ashton comments. “The disease changes the culture and politics of the city, [which, in turn] have a lot to do with how we treat diseases. So we did shows on cholera, smallpox, and now AIDS, which is a logical successor.”
AIDS in New York: The First Five Years includes photographs, newspaper clippings, and also film and TV footage, and oral history. “We had our story,” Ashton says, explaining the process behind choosing the art and artifacts to be included in the exhibit, “and we wanted to see what we could find [to] most effectively convey the story, the narrative. Part of it was the availability [of the artwork] and [the other] part was what we thought were the most powerful images. We tried to make the narrative by using whatever we could to illustrate the story. We’re not focusing on the art, [although] there are beautiful pictures and they tell the story.”
The photographs speak for themselves. They create a powerful visual composite through which they tell—or retell—the story of AIDS and its reality as it unfolded at the time. With that, the exhibit offers some individuals, especially today’s young generation, an opportunity to reconsider its attitude toward AIDS, while giving others a chance to revisit tucked-away memories, relive events, and commemorate those lost to the epidemic.
Ashton doesn’t have a favorite image. Not quite. “I think the picture of the first AIDS memorial service,” she finally says, “I think it captures very well the sense of mourning that people were beginning to have as they realized that their friends were dying around them.” The First AIDS Memorial in New York City, Central Park Bandshell image was taken at the first big AIDS vigil in 1983. It captures the despair that was sinking in at the time. “It went on for many years,” Ashton adds, “but this was at the beginning.”
Images may speak to the audience in different ways, of different aspects of the pandemic. One of the photographs shows a group of parents protesting at the Board of Education in 1985, because a few children with AIDS had been enrolled in a public school, in Queens, New York. That caused an uproar among parents who, in turn, called for a boycott of the school. “It really demonstrates the degree of hysteria and fear that was present in these early days,” Ashton notes about the Parents Protesting Board of Education photograph.
Also included in the exhibit is a newspaper clipping showing a picture of New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch at a press conference, in 1983. “There was and still remains a good deal of controversy about the mayor’s role in the crisis over AIDS,” Ashton says, talking about the image. “He was criticized for not acting fast enough. He himself said that he acted as fast as he could. In this particular press conference he explains what he did to establish his mission.”
Another image shows a poster advertising the opening of Larry Kramer’s play, The Normal Heart. “It comes toward the conclusion of our exhibit,” Ashton explains. “It illustrates the way in which AIDS became part of the mainstream, when it was no longer a hidden secret.”
AIDS in New York focuses on the impact of people with AIDS on their community, but also on the desperate energy of the doctors and research scientists to find a treatment or a cure, while suddenly seeing people, who otherwise were apparently healthy, begin to die, and not being able to do anything to save them. “There was a good deal of intensity in terms of trying to solve the problem,” Ashton says. “And, you know, [researchers and doctors] would run into problems even in their labs and hospitals because [AIDS] was not a popular disease. I don’t think it would happen again in exactly the same way, but you know, it’s really unpredictable. And people act sometimes heroically and sometimes badly when they are afraid.”
Lee Snider. [Closure of The Anvil], 1985. Lee Snider/Photo Images; courtesy of the Fales Library & Special Collections, NYU.
Ashton hopes that the exhibit will show people how serious the disease still is. Physicians and healthcare professionals treating AIDS today believe that AIDS has not gone away, but rather underground. People don’t talk about it anymore, yet according to recent statistics infection rates are still high, especially among individuals twenty-nine or younger. Stigma and taboos are still present in many communities even now because AIDS is a sexual disease. In addition, because AIDS is not an immediate death sentence anymore, people don’t take it seriously anymore. They get careless, and they get infected.
“Many people today think that AIDS is a chronic disease,” Ashton says, “and that it can be controlled by drugs. Yet, they fail to realize that AIDS is a serious disease, and that the related stigma, anger, and discrimination impede the effects of treating the disease.” She adds, “Many people may remember ACT UP and its role in fighting for people’s lives. This was a period that [only] gradually filtered into people’s consciousness. It’s a story that could be about any disease blamed on bad habits or immorality, such as how cholera in the nineteenth century was blamed on the ‘filthy habits’ of the Irish. The social prejudices really are aroused when people are afraid of disease, and I thought it was a story worth telling again.”
AIDS in New York: The First Five Years opens on June 7 at the New-York Historical Society in New York City, and it runs through September 15. Other events are planned as well. For more information, log on to www.nyhistory.org.
Alina Oswald is a writer, photographer, and the author of Journeys Through Darkness: A Biography of AIDS. Contact her at www.alinaoswald.com.
The Origin of AIDS
by Jacques Pepin
Cambridge University Press
Reviewed by Alina Oswald
The first officially documented AIDS cases surfaced in the United States in 1981. With the epidemic, so started the quest for AIDS origins, and also a cure. More than three decades later, a cure is not yet in sight, but the image of the cradle of AIDS, its time and place defined, has come into new focus, as have the trails the virus first took to take over the world.
There are several theories surrounding the origins of AIDS, some more controversial than others. The widely accepted theories involve a few common factors: Africa as the birthplace of the pandemic; a monkey hunter as its Patient Zero; a virus that jumped species from a chimp to a human, and then tens of millions of individuals.
While many books captured various facets of AIDS after its impact on the mainstream community, Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On offered a chronicle of the early years of AIDS. Following in Shilts’ footsteps, Canadian epidemiologist Jacques Pepin captures an even earlier picture of the AIDS pandemic through its catalysts—social factors that allowed HIV’s incendiary spread and the virus’s innate ability to start a pandemic. In the process, Pepin finds, possibly once and for all, the answers to questions we’ve been asking ourselves for decades:
What (and maybe who) helped the few initial HIV infections to set off a pandemic?
Why?
How could we let it happen?
In his new book, Pepin revisits “the origins of AIDS,” taking us on a journey back in time and place, to early twentieth century Central Africa, offering a scientific documentation of the evolution of AIDS from cradle to pandemic. Pepin follows this remarkable journey chronicling the many factors—including political, economical, and also human—that have facilitated the first few HIV infections to grow exponentially, travel from Africa to Europe and Haiti to reach the United States, and come to light in the summer of 1981.
In his book, Pepin explains his theory that the original HIV infections (from chimps to humans) were very few and thus impossible, by themselves, to set off a pandemic. Human and social factors helped as well: the en-masse immunizations for sleeping disease, while using same needles, and also the virus’s ability to initiate this pandemic under certain conditions. And it was possible because we/humans facilitated these conditions.
The language of Pepin’s book is academic, yet easily accessible to a lay, educated readership. Graphics, charts and maps emphasize the text content. The Origins of AIDS offers, for the first time, an in-depth look into the pandemic prior to 1981 and, with that, the missing pieces that complete the story of AIDS.
Alina Oswald is a writer/photographer and the author of Journeys Through Darkness, a biography of AIDS. Contact her at www.alina-arts.com or follow her blog, Unconventional, at alinaoswald.blogspot.com.
![Lee Snider. [First AIDS Memorial Service in New York City, Central Park Bandshell], June 13, 1983. Lee Snider/Photo Images; courtesy of the Fales Library & Special Collections, NYU](https://aumag.org/files/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/snider-lee_i_1_first-aids-memorial-service-13-june-1983-image-3004-web-201x300.jpg)
![Frank Fournier. [Parents Protesting Board of Education], 1985. © Frank Fournier/Contact Press Images/New-York Historical Society, AIDS in New York: The First Five Years.](https://aumag.org/files/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/anti-gayfou8509_usaaidsnyc-001-web-300x205.jpg)
![Lee Snider. [Closure of The Anvil], 1985. Lee Snider/Photo Images; courtesy of the Fales Library & Special Collections, NYU.](https://aumag.org/files/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/snider-lee_i_1_the-anvil-self-induced-closure003-web-300x201.jpg)
