AIDS & Art: Artists in an Epidemic: The Decker Library Reading List

In "AIDS", three Harvard-educated physicians explore the evolution of the HIV epidemic, contextualizing the disease from historical, social, and medical perspectives. Addressing the last 25 years, the book examines basic biological principles, including what a virus is, how the human immune system works, and how HIV impairs these functions. It presents an in-depth discussion of the HIV life cycle, explores central issues pertaining to diagnosis and treatment, and sheds light on how the treatment was developed and implemented.

Does the scientific “theory” that HIV came to North America from Haiti stem from underlying attitudes of racism and ethnocentrism in the United States rather than from hard evidence? Award-winning author and anthropologist-physician Paul Farmer answers with this, the first full-length ethnographic study of AIDS in a poor society. First published in 1992 this new edition has been updated and a new preface added.

In this book, Thomas L. Long examines the ways in which gay and AIDS activists, artists, writers, scientists, and journalists appropriated this apocalyptic rhetoric in order to mobilize attention to the medical crisis, prevent the spread of the disease, and treat the HIV infected. Using the analytical tools of literary analysis, cultural studies, performance theory, and social semiotics, "AIDS and American Apocalypticism" examines many kinds of discourse, including fiction, drama, performance art, demonstration graphics and brochures, biomedical publications, and journalism and shows that, while initially useful, the effects of apocalyptic rhetoric in the long term are dangerous. Among the important figures in AIDS activism and the arts discussed are David Drake, Tim Miller, Sarah Schulman, and Tony Kushner, as well as the organizations ACT UP and Lesbian Avengers.

The book chronicles the discovery and spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) with a special emphasis on government indifference and political infighting—specifically in the United States—to what was then perceived as a specifically gay disease.

"AIDS and Its Metaphors" is a 1989 work of critical theory by Susan Sontag. In this companion book to her Illness as Metaphor, Sontag extends her arguments about the metaphors attributed to cancer to the AIDS crisis. Sontag explores how attitudes to disease are formed in society, and attempts to deconstruct them.

The world of the arts has been devastated by AIDS. Few performing or visual artists have escaped the epidemic's impingement upon either their own lives or those of close friends and mentors. But beyond this obvious impact, AIDS has had - and is having - an ultimately more far-reaching effect: it has changed the very form and content of contemporary art.

In what the authors call a "do-it-yourself manual, showing how to make propaganda work in the fight against AIDS," they depict a history of demonstrations, sit-ins and similar steps taken by ACT UP and other groups. The volume is illustrated with photos of the protests as well as graphics used in conjunction with them, such as a poster featuring a penis and the words: "Sexism Rears Its Unprotected Head/Men: Use Condoms or Beat It" (according to Bay Press, Arcata Graphics, the book's original printer, reneged on its contract with Bay, citing "sensitive" material). One typical entry, recounting ACT UP's civil disobedience at FDA headquarters, is accompanied by a placard saying, "Time isn't the only thing the FDA is killing." Another describes the group Gran Fury's "same-sex kiss-in," publicized with two posters: one a WW II photo of kissing sailors, the other showing a lesbian couple from a 1920s stage play.

"Screaming in the Streets: AIDS, Art, Activism" focuses on the meaning of radical spaces for sexual minorities and reflects upon a generation of lost artists, while illustrating the interconnectedness and collaborative working relationships among them.

Catalog of limited edition published by ClampArt and Ward 5B on the occasion of exhibition curated by Greg Ellis, held at ClampArt, New York, N.Y., August 3-September 23, 2017. Artists included in the exhibition include Kenny Burgess, Peter Hujar, Haoui Montaug, Essex Hemphill, David Wojnarowicz, Dorian Corey, Mark Morrisroe, Assotto Saint, Arthur Russell, Gordon Stevenson, Keith Haring, Reinaldo Arenas, Ethyl Eichelberger, Jimmy De Sana, and others.

In "Reframing Bodies", Roger Hallas illuminates the capacities of film and video to bear witness to the cultural, political, and psychological imperatives of the AIDS crisis. He explains how queer films and videos made in response to the AIDS epidemics in North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa challenge longstanding assumptions about both historical trauma and the politics of gay visibility. Drawing on a wide range of works, including activist tapes, found footage films, autobiographical videos, documentary portraits, museum installations, and even film musicals, Hallas reveals how such “queer AIDS media” simultaneously express both immediacy and historical consciousness.

"Acts of Intervention" examines the ways that gay men have used theatre and performance to intervene in the AIDS crisis. It discusses dramatic texts and public performances—from cabarets and candlelight vigils to full-scale Broadway productions such as Angels in America and Rent—that have shaped, and been shaped by, the history of AIDS in national, regional, and local contexts. Román examines mainstream as well as alternative and activist forms of theatre, including solo performance, community-based projects, mixed-media events, activist demonstrations, and AIDS educational theatre initiatives.

"In the wake of the AIDS crisis, the American arts community arguably has been the most devastated segment of our population. AIDS has killed scores of painters, writers, dancers, and actors, taking them in their prime and robbing our culture of their legacy. Journalist Vaucher interviewed two dozen HIV-positive artists (Paul Monette, Larry Kramer, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, among others) most of whom have just hit their stride and are now being faced with issues most of us have a lifetime, or at least old age, to consider. These men and women talk about how the disease has affected their life and work."
- Jeffery Ingram, Newport P.L., Ore.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This book is packed with over 100 images in black and white and color and some great texts about and by Wojnarowicz. Every aspect of Wojnarowicz's work is included: paintings, collages, photography, writing, film stills, performance stills, and more. A must - and an important addition to any library concerned with Queer culture, AIDS, activism, and the East Village Art Scene of the 1980s.

Published to accompany a travelling exhibition originating at the University Galleries, Illinois State University, Normal, Jan. 23-Mar. 4, 1990, and closing at The Temple Gallery and Tyler Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, Feb. 1-Mar. 2, 1991.

The first collection of writings by a noted artist and activist whose work has focused on the AIDS epidemic. The HIV epidemic animates this collection of essays by a noted artist, writer, and activist. “So total was the burden of illness—mine and others’—that the only viable response, other than to cease making art entirely, was to adjust to the gravity of the predicament by using the crisis as a lens,” writes Gregg Bordowitz, a film- and video-maker whose best-known works, Fast Trip Long Drop (1993) and Habit (2001), address AIDS globally and personally.

David Wojnarowicz was an abused child, a teen runaway who barely finished high school, but he emerged as one of the most important voices of his generation. He found his tribe in New York's East Village, a neighborhood noted in the 1970s and '80s for drugs, blight, and a burgeoning art scene. His creativity spilled out in paintings, photographs, films, texts, installations, and in his life and its recounting-creating a sort of mythos around himself. His circle of East Village artists moved into the national spotlight just as the AIDS plague began its devastating advance, and as right-wing culture warriors reared their heads. As Wojnarowicz's reputation as an artist grew, so did his reputation as an agitator-because he dealt so openly with his homosexuality, so angrily with his circumstances as a Person With AIDS, and so fiercely with his would-be censors.

Fire in the Belly is the untold story of a polarizing figure at a pivotal moment in American culture-and one of the most highly acclaimed biographies of the year.

"The tragedy of a New York couple recounted in this candid, poignant journal also serves as a means of catharsis for the first-time author, who is the widow of an AIDS-afflicted mate. Cox's pain over her impending loss was compounded by a sense of betrayal at the duplicity of Keith, who had not told her he was gay until he sickened. During months of nursing him she grappled with a need to reassess their relationship and protect their two-year-old son Luke from the stigma of his father's illness. Anger and fear vied with love while a growing exhaustion bred the author's resentment and despair. Keith died in 1987 after an intentional overdose of medication. His last words to his wife were, 'You are my victory. Luke will be my triumph.'"
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Both an important cultural history of the AIDS crisis and an intimate personal memoir, Stitching a Revolution is the story of a man who, besieged by discrimination, death, and despair, found the courage and strength of spirit to conceive and create a unique healing vision-the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

What if it's not true that you only live once? In this genre-transcending book, trans writer and media artist Chase Joynt and HIV-positive movie artist Mike Hoolboom come together over the films of Chris Marker to exchange transition tales, confessional missives that map out the particularities of occupying what they call ‘second lives’: Chase’s transition from female to male and Mike’s near-death from AIDS.

Weaving cultural theory with memoir and media analysis, YOLT ("You Only Live Twice") asks intimate questions about what it might mean to find love and hope through conversation across generations.

Nestled in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, the town of Johnson City had always seemed exempt from the anxieties of modern American life. But when the local hospital treated its first AIDS patient, a crisis that had once seemed an “urban problem” had arrived in the town to stay.

Working in Johnson City was Abraham Verghese, a young Indian doctor specializing in infectious diseases. Dr. Verghese became by necessity the local AIDS expert, soon besieged by a shocking number of male and female patients whose stories came to occupy his mind, and even take over his life. Verghese brought a singular perspective to Johnson City: as a doctor unique in his abilities; as an outsider who could talk to people suspicious of local practitioners; above all, as a writer of grace and compassion who saw that what was happening in this conservative community was both a medical and a spiritual emergency.

"When Marion Winik fell in love with Tony Heubach during a wild Mardi Gras in New Orleans, her friends shook their heads. For starters, she was straight and he was gay. But Marion and Tony's impossible love turned out to be true enough to produce a marriage and two beautiful sons, true enough to weather drug addiction, sexual betrayal, and the AIDS that would kill Tony at the age of thirty-seven, twelve years after they met.

In a memoir heartbreaking and hilarious by turns, Marion Winik tells a story that is all more powerful for the way in which it defies easy judgments. As it charts the trajectory of a marriage so impossible that it became inevitable, 'First Comes Love' reminds us—poignantly indelibly—that every story is a special case."

In Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz gives us an important and timely document: a collection of creative essays -- a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal testimony to the Fear of Diversity in America. From the author's violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most provocative artists of his generation -- Close to the Knives is his powerful and iconoclastic memoir. Street life, drugs, art and nature, family, AIDS, politics, friendship and acceptance: Wojnarowicz challenges us to examine our lives -- politically, socially, emotionally, and aesthetically.

Avena, the founder and editor of the Bastard Review , has compiled a stunning collection of poetry and prose by 14 artists and writers who (with the exception of one) have AIDS or are HIV-positive. Among the gifted and controversial contributors are Severo Sarduy, who, like Avena, draws parallels between AIDS and the Holocaust; William Dickey and Edmund White, who compare AIDS with aging; Marlon Riggs, who says of the simultaneity of living and dying, ``we are simultaneously diminished by what enlarges us in life--a seeming contradiction that defines the fundamental meaning of existence''; and David Wojnarowicz, who describes his growing despair: ``I am all emptiness and futility . . . a dark smudge in the air that dissipates without notice.''

Fiercely devoted to the margins of life in the generation after the devastating first wave of the AIDS epidemic, this cathartic collection of poems explores illness, travel, contagion, the meaning of home, identity, tainted purity, and the bits of life that contain them and hold them together in spite of the harsh exigency of daily life. In more than 40 pieces, Chin fearlessly delivers everything from his first exposure to science ("Magnified") to a mail order fantasy experience ("I Buy Sea Monkeys"); from backroads travel in Asia ("Little Everest in Your Palm") to the plight of immigrants in America ("The Men's Restroom at the INS Building"). Chin's brutal honesty and sharp humor frame a profound and original collection.

Tory Dent's is a voice like no other. Her use of language is virtuosic, complex, and plangent. These are daring poems that also dare the reader. HIV positive, Dent writes out of her own experience and profound refusal to look away or suspend feeling or turn from love. When her first book of poems, What Silence Equals, appeared in 1993, it was recognized as "immediately one of the great, necessary books to come out of the AIDS crisis, flinging its challenge in the face of death." With "HIV, Mon Amour" she moves further into the whirlwind -- as witness, lover, and observer.

An eighteen-poem cycle on the death of his lover from AIDS emphasizes the power of love and its survival through pain and anger, and the tragedy and magnitude of a terrifying twist of fate and its effect on a generation.

"Blue Pills", by Swiss artist Frederick Peeters, chronicles his relationship with Cati, a wild, vivacious girl he meets at a New Years Party. They connect and become lovers. Before long Cati tells Fred that she and her three-year-old son are both HIV positive. He is filled with a mixture of passion, pity and desire, but he does his best to act cool. Although disconcerted, he wants the relationship to work, and so it does. The book charts Fred’s evolving relationship with Cati’s son, cataloguing his periods of illness, his stays in hospital and the routine of his medication- the blue pills of the title.

AIDS and HIV are the threads that bind this collection together. But rather than death, this wonderful book explodes with life.–Roy Parvin, author of In the Snow Forest“It’s been a long time since I read a collection as strong, stirring, and surprising as "Women in the Grove". Each story is tied in some way to AIDS-but thrillingly the true adventure here is the strength of the human heart. Paula Peterson is a dazzling writer.”–Marcie Hershman, author of Safe in America and Speak to Me: Grief, Love and What Endures

Smith's unflinching poetry addresses race, class, sexuality, faith, social justice, mortality, and the challenges of living HIV positive at the intersection of black and queer identity. The collection opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved on earth. "Dear White America," which Smith performed at the 2014 Rustbelt Midwest Region Poetry Slam, has as strong an impact on the page as it did on the spoken word stage. Smith's courage and hope amidst the struggle for unity in America will humble and uplift you.

"Based on my work done in the Kibera slums of Nairobi, Kenya, this book documents the children who attend a school called Angels of Hope, and how tightly they have become sewn into my consciousness. The kids in these pages wear a red bandana because they all are affected by the AIDS epidemic in some way. Parents are living with or have died from the disease. Relatives have been caught by this plague. And even some of these beautiful children themselves are HIV-positive. Add the problems already faced by everyone living in one of the largest slums in the world, and you can see how dire the situation is. The format of this book is arranged in a way for viewers to initially glimpse only a symbolic piece of each child's life, before turning the page and realizing that the enormity and complexity of the struggles faced are incomprehensible. The poetry guides readers through my thought process every day that I spent in the slum, trying to make sense of the senseless things I heard and saw. All proceeds from this book go directly towards funding these kids and their school, and building the future that they were not born with, but deserve nonetheless."

In Baltimore City, African American men seeking men are at significant risk of acquiring HIV. In partnership with Baltimore City Health Department's Bureau of STD/HIV Prevention, MICA's Center for Social Design created the first issue of BALL magazine, a publication "serving up sex, status, and style." BALL encourages HIV treatment adherence and opens up the conversation about what it means to be healthy and sexy. The publication showcases stories from Baltimore's ballroom scene, a community primarily composed of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) individuals who attend competitive runway performance events.

Many people believe that AIDS has moved from being the “gay men’s disease” it was thought to be during the 1980s and early 1990s to being a disease that affects mainly people in the developing world. While the numbers of deaths in the developing world do indeed dwarf those in the industrialized world, two important facts still remain: There is no cure for AIDS, and unprotected sex can kill.

Dr. Monica Sweeney is on the front line of the fight against AIDS, both as a member of the President’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS and as a doctor working in the heart of the inner city at the Bedford-Stuyvesant Family Health Center in Brooklyn, New York. Every day, she sees the toll that HIV and AIDS take on families and neighborhoods.

In South Africa, The Siyazama Project enables rural, traditional craftswomen from KwaZulu-Natal to express their concerns about AIDS and all of its complexities through their beautiful cloth dolls and beadwork. The Siyazama Project and its producers communicate and spread awareness of HIV/AIDS through creative workshops, local and international exhibitions, museum collections, publications, and on-going research activities. Kate Wells, the leader of The Siyazama Project, has compiled this attractive, full color book to illustrate the main collaborators' roles in Siyazama ('we are trying').

Set in 1985. Revolves around two very different men with AIDS, one fictional, one fictionalized. Roy Cohn, personifies all the hypocrisy, delusion and callousness of the official response to the plague. Nothing shakes Roy's lack of empathy: even on his death bed, he's fighting with his gay nurse and taunting the woman he helped put to death, Ethel Rosenberg. The other patient is Prior Walter, who is visited by an angel and deserted by his self-pitying lover, Louis. Louis moves on to a relationship with Joe Pitt, a Mormon lawyer whose closeted homosexuality drives his wife to delusions and brings his mother to New York.

In Paris in the early 1990s, a group of activists go to battle for those stricken with HIV/AIDS, taking on sluggish government agencies and major pharmaceutical companies. Amid rallies, protests, fierce debates and ecstatic dance parties, the newcomer Nathan falls in love with Sean, the group's radical firebrand, and their passion sparks against the shadow of mortality as the activists fight for a breakthrough.

A look at dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones' highly acclaimed dance, "Still/Here". At workshops around the country, people facing life-threatening illnesses are asked to remember the highs and lows of their lives, and even imagine their own deaths. They then transform these feelings into expressive movement, which Jones incorporates into the dance "Still/Here". Jones demonstrates the movements of his life story--his first encounter with white people, confusion over his sexuality, his partner Arnie Zane's untimely death from AIDS, and Jones' own HIV status.

Blue 1993 is a film by the British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman which features a single static shot of the color blue with a voiceover and musical soundtrack. The voiceover, written by Jarman, consists of a diaristic and poetic text documenting his AIDS-related illness and impending death at a time that he had become partially blind, his vision often interrupted by blue light. The film is Jarman’s last feature and was completed only a few months before he died.

The story of the AIDS Memorial Quilt established by the San Francisco NAMES Project Foundation in 1987 to commemorate the lives lost to AIDS. From the thousands memorialized in the quilt, profiles five individuals--including a recovered IV drug user, a former Olympic decathlon star and a boy with hemophilia--whose stories reflect the diversity and common tragedy of those who have died from AIDS. Celebrates their unique personalities and achievements, interweaving these personal histories with a chronology of the epidemic's development and the negligence of the government.

Profiles Keith Haring who died of AIDS in February 1990. Haring went from being an anonymous graffiti artist who drew chalk figures on New York City subway posters, to being called the successor to Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. His hieroglyphics-like style filtered the modern world through the perspective and wonderment of a child, yet he always incorporated social issues such as the fight against apartheid, crack, and AIDS into his work. Includes interviews with gallery owners Leo Castelli and Tony Shafrazi, actor/friend Dennis Hopper, and Whitney Museum curator Barbara Haskell.

In a rural village in Zimbabwe, Tamari and Itai are devastated when both their parents die of AIDS. For the four children this is a time of fear and survival as family and neighbors turn their heads away because of the stigma of AIDS. The city is just as hostile as is the village. In the end it is only tragedy that can bridge the gulf of denial and make the community realize that these are everyone's children. Based on a story by Shimmer Chinodya.

"The National AIDS Memorial Grove, a seven-acre sanctuary in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park...shows how a community in crisis fround healing and remembrance, and how the seeds of a few visionary environmentalists blossomed into something larger than they could have imagined. But the fight to remember takes on an unexpected dimension when stakeholders of the Grove seek broader public recongition through an international design competition, and a battle erupts about what constiututes an appropriate memorial for the AIDS pandemic. Thirty years after the first diagnosed cases of AIDS, how de we mark a time of unimaginable loss? And what does it mean to be a national memorial?"

The story of the brave young men and women who successfully reversed the tide of an epidemic, demanded the attention of a fearful nation, and stopped AIDS from becoming a death sentence. This improbable group of activists bucked oppression and infiltrated government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, helping to identify promising new medication and treatments and move them through trials and into drugstores in record time.

Two competing lawyers join forces to sue a prestigious law firm for AIDS discrimination. As their unlikely friendship develops, their courage overcomes the prejudice and corruption of their powerful adversaries.

In an experimental amalgam of rap music, street poetry, documentary film, and dance, a gay African-American man expresses what it is like to be gay and black in the United States. Although he deals with social ostracism and fear of AIDS, he affirms the beauty and significance of the gay black man.

This film "combines startling archival footage that puts the audience on the ground with the activists and the remarkably insightful interviews from the ACT UP Oral History Project to explore ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) from a grassroots perspective--how a small group of men and women of all races and classes, came together to change the world and save each other's lives. The film takes the viewer through the planning and execution of a half dozen exhilarating major actions including Seize Control of the FDA, Stop the Church, and Day of Desperation, with a timeline of many of the other zaps and actions that forced the U.S. government and mainstream media to deal with the AIDS crisis, while revealing the group's complex culture--meetings, affinity groups, and approaches to civil disobedience mingle with profound grief, sexiness, and the incredible energy of ACT UP"