Dual Shows Expose AIDS’ Continued Impact on American Culture

Two sister-shows about how HIV/AIDS shaped American art have found their homes in two of New York’s boroughs, Manhattan and the Bronx. Uptown, The Bronx Museum of the Arts houses Art AIDS America, 125 pieces of various media dating from 1981 to today from a wide range of creatives who, along with many Bronx-affiliated artists, count among their ranks Robert Mapplethorpe, Annie Leibovitz, and Kia Labeija. Jonathan David Katz, who co-curated Art AIDS America with Rock Hushka, also curated the downtown show at The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art with Andrew Barron. A Deeper Dive spotlights the work of nine different LGBTQ artists from the uptown show, namely Lawrence Broze, Brian Buczak, John Dugdale, Jimmy DeSana, Karen Finley, Deborah Kass, Glenn Ligon, Ann P Meredith, and Anthony Viti.

Through these artists, the shows both acknowledge the enduring devastation wreaked by the AIDS crisis as well as celebrate the tragic creativity generated by the disease and its fallout. “Throughout the vast bulk of the period covered by [these exhibitions], our government, the art world, even society in general were actively AIDS-phobic and homophobic,” Katz tells The Creators Project. “Most artists couldn’t make work directly engaged with AIDS and still expect to be shown and seen outside activist circles. Such repression is lousy for the psyche, but great for art.”

He continues. “[This] adds layers of significance to works, forcing the viewer to tease out meanings only suggested or hinted at, while leaving the works open to the viewer’s own experience and thought processes.” It is through this phenomenon that David Wojnarowicz’s eerie 1988-89 piece, Untitled (Buffalo), featured in the uptown show, metamorphosizes from an incomprehensible scene of animal sacrifice into an allegory for the equally incomprehensible epidemic that was then sending the photographer’s friends, former lovers, and fellow artists to their untimely deaths.

“But at the same time as it opens the art to a range of meanings, it also delimits the free play of possibility, because these works clearly have a central preoccupation, theme, or consistency of purpose,” the curator explains. “They seek to seed ideas in our heads without ever stating their intent. Because of this dual process of opening and closing possibilities for meaning, AIDS helped rewrite the terms of significance in American Art.”

The inarguable impact of AIDS on American culture has, as Katz notes, nevertheless been stigmatized and repressed, just like the artists who sought to record the loss, anger, and intimacy of the crisis itself. “We have sought to make [AIDS’ influence] a tragic tangent in American history, allowing us to safely sequester it as separate from us, as something that afflicted others,” says Katz. “But the thing about AIDS is that it can’t be contained, and as this exhibition is intended to underscore, its influences have refashioned how we make art even today.”

In realizing the show, the curators experienced a very real example of this attitude. “I expected the main exhibition, Art AIDS America, to be in Manhattan, at a museum like the Whitney or the New Museum,” Katz divulges. “But no Manhattan-based museum was interested, itself a telling fact.”

In addition to the works on display at both spaces, these exhibitions are also designed as sites to encourage understanding and tolerance. “Now that AIDS is becoming, at least in the West, a more chronic and less lethal condition, the impetus to ‘other’ it is declining,” Katz says. “As we have become less hysterical about the ‘threat’ from AIDS, we can finally own it and begin to assess its impact on our culture.” In this spirit, the uptown show extends into the lobby with an informational vitrine produced by Visual AIDS and has planned a series of public programs about AIDS and the arts.

Finally, when asked if he believes that contemporary artists need to continue this public investigation into the cultural impacts of AIDS, Katz says, “I’d put the question another way.” He continues, “I don’t think we need to tell artists what to do, but I do think we need to widen the parameters of what we’re allowed to show in museums and galleries. It’s not a question of what artist’s make, it’s a question of how that work circulates.”

Art AIDS America will be on view at The Bronx Museum of the Arts and A Deeper Dive, at The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, until September 25.

Related:

A 'Queer Enlightenment' at the World's First Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art

Beyond the Pink Triangle: A New Generation Tackles HIV/AIDS Awareness

How the AIDS Epidemic Was an Attack on Imagination