Rachel Chapple Recruits Artists, Writers—Everyone—for a Conversation About AIDS by Chael Needle Imagination is the path to empathy. That’s the core of a recently launched on-line HIV awareness and prevention campaign called Real Stories Gallery. The not-for-profit Web site brings together visuals and storytelling into an ongoing and ever-changing conversation, one that interlinks diverse geographic regions, topics, and media. The aim, in part, is to pull visitors out of their spectator role and into a participatory one. Toward this end, the conversation—like any good one—needs to [...]

A New Exhibit Proves It Takes at Least Two to Play Hide and Seek by Chael Needle There’s a danger that “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” currently running at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., will become known as the exhibition whose hosting institution, the Smithsonian, censored a work by an artist who has come to have a major influence on how we understand AIDS. This happened on the eve of World AIDS Day. And that work is a four-minute video excerpt [...]

GMHC in partnership with Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation present Art & AIDS: Loving Life, An Exhibition of the Humanity, Spirit and Love of Artists Living with HIV & AIDS. Curated by Osvaldo Perdomo and David Livingston, the exhibition will feature painting, photography and drawing by forty-five artists, including George Towne, Eric Rhein, Shangaboy, Loreen Bryant, and Brian Crede. An opening reception will take place on Tuesday, Oct 26, (6-8 p.m.) at the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation, 26 Wooster Street (between Canal & Grand), in Manhattan’s [...]