Through Music and Composers Who Created It, a New Film Tells the Story of the AIDS Crisis by Chip Alfred It began with a chance meeting between two of the most unlikely collaborators. When eccentric seventy-something New York pianist Mimi Stern-Wolfe met exuberant twenty-something Australian filmmaker Rohan Spong, their futures were about to change. After Stern-Wolfe worked on the music for one of Spong’s films, the director was captivated by her and a concert series she’d been producing every year for the last two decades. [...]

May 4 marks the birthday of Keith Haring, one of the most prolific and popular artists to take on AIDS awareness. In 2008, Lester Strong wrote about Haring’s work and a new book on the artist that had been recently published. A New Book Celebrates the Art and Life of AIDS Acivist Keith Haring by Lester Strong Anyone living in New York City during the early 1980s knew Keith Haring’s art long before they knew his name: odd but amusing stick figures drawn with white chalk [...]

The First Retrospective of Gran Fury Reminds that Kissing Doesn’t Kill (Greed and Indifference Do) by Angela Leroux-Lindsey In November 1989, New York Archbishop John O’Connor opened the first Vatican conference on AIDS by declaring “The truth is not in condoms or clean needles. These are lies…good morality is good medicine.” An incendiary statement: implicit in O’Connor’s assertion was more than simple ignorance, or willful distortion of the effect of public health; his attack on advances toward safe sex and efforts to provide safe needle exchanges [...]

Journeys Through Darkness by Alina Oswald CreateSpace Reviewed by Chip Alfred To put it simply, Kurt Weston’s story is a writer’s dream. Having endured more than his share of nightmares, Weston, a long-term AIDS survivor and legally blind photographer, is an inspiration to anyone confronted with seemingly insurmountable obstacles to overcome. In a new biography, Alina Oswald deftly takes the reader along on Weston’s path to healing and self-discovery—occasionally winding up in some dark and desperate places. The author paints a meticulously-defined picture of a [...]

MCA Chicago’s “This Will Have Been” Revisits the Political Urgency of the 1980s by Larry Buhl In the 2010 film Hot Tub Time Machine, one character scoffs at nostalgia for the 1980s: “We had, like, Reagan and AIDS.” The line was meant as a joke, though for many sick and dying Reagan’s lack of response to AIDS was a defining aspect of the period. Another defining aspect: art about AIDS. In an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, HIV/AIDS is a dominant theme, [...]

GMHC’s “Art & AIDS: 30 Years” Celebrates the Power of Art in the Epidemic by Angela Leroux-Lindsey On the eve of World AIDS Day, the Leslie/Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York hosted an opening reception for “Art & AIDS: 30 Years,” a gallery exhibit featuring a stunning array of work produced by artists who are living with HIV. The gallery was packed with people eager to celebrate the talented and inspiring artists represented, and also to support a renewed commitment to [...]

Curator John Chaich and Visual AIDS team up together in the show Mixed Messages to remind us that apathy is no cure for aids by Lester Strong The use of text as visual art has a distinguished past: Hebrew and Islamic art, medieval illuminated manuscripts, post-World War I Russian Constructivism are a few examples that come to mind. Curator John Chaich has updated that tradition into our contemporary world, placing it in an AIDS context, in a recent (June 2 through July 3) exhibition for [...]