University at Buffalo
Department of
Art
Art & Design
Art History
Visual Studies
26th Annual Day With(out) Art on World AIDS Day Panel Discussion and Video Screening
November 17, 2015 by: Natalie Fleming
Shan Kelley, “With Curators Like These, Who Needs A Cure,” 2015. oil paint, semen, resin on wood, 5×7 in.
Newly produced video RADIANT PRESENCE to screen at UB
followed by a panel discussion on HIV/AIDS
Event recognizes 26th Annual Day With(out) Art on World AIDS Day 2015
In recognition of the 26th annual Day With(out) Art on World AIDS Day, the UB Department of Art, Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Visual AIDS, UB Center for Disability Studies, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, UB Queer Studies Research Workshop, UB Disability Studies Workshop, Pride Center of WNY, Gay and Lesbian Youth Services (GLYS), and UB Student Health Services present a FREE screening of the newly released RADIANT PRESENCE followed by a panel discussion. The event will take place on Tuesday, December 1, at 7:00 p.m. in the Department of Art Gallery, B45, Center for the Arts, on the North Campus and is free and open to the public.
Jonathan D. Katz, Chair of the UB Department of Art and curator of the current national museum exhibit Art AIDS America which contextualizes 30 years of art related to the AIDS epidemic commented: “How to represent the unrepresentable? How do you give form to an experience so fraught, so traumatic as to turn even the most accomplished representation into a mere footnote? The visual archive around AIDS does something that the literary archive cannot. It can talk about, connote, even represent AIDS without necessarily mentioning it—and it is paradoxically more accurate and more moving for precisely what it does not say.”
Working in conjunction with influential artists, activist and curators Bill Arning, Ian Alteveer, Chris Vargas, Rae Lewis-Thornton, Mark S. King, Allen Frame, Maria Mejia, Jack Mackenroth, and Kimberley Drew, Visual AIDS is presenting RADIANT PRESENCE for Day With(out) Art 2015. RADIANT PRESENCE features images from the Visual AIDS’ Artist+ Registry, the largest database of works by artists with HIV/AIDS. RADIANT PRESENCE is inspired by Electric Blanket (1990), an epic slideshow about AIDS created by photographers Nan Goldin, Allen Frame, and Frank Franca for Visual AIDS which intersperses the work of over 200 photographers with slide texts that include demographics, data, and slogans about AIDS worldwide.
Screening of RADIANT PRESENCE will take place all-day in both the UB Art Gallery and the Department of Art Gallery, Center for the Arts, UB North Campus. Provoking conversations about HIV stigma, treatment, and access to treatment, the multiple demographics of people living with HIV, and the work of artists impacted by and responding to HIV/AIDS, a panel discussion will be moderated by Conor Moynihan, PhD student in Visual Studies, UB. Panelists include:
- Lawrence Brose, experimental film artist
- Ally Day, PhD, Assistant Professor, Disability Studies Program, University of Toledo
- Matthew Crehan Higgins, Senior Director, Pride Center of Western New York
- Jeffrey M. Hutchins, Adult Health Nurse Practitioner, UB Student Health Services
- Lance Rintamaki, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Communications, UB
Day With(out) Art (DWA) began on December 1, 1989 as the national day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis. In 1997, Visual AIDS added the parentheses to highlight the proactive programming of art projects by artists living with HIV/AIDS, and art about AIDS, that were taking place around the world. For more information on RADIANT PRESENCE visit https://www.visualaids.org/projects/detail/radiant-presence.
Moynihan commented, “A quarter of a century after the first Day With(out) Art, we have seen great medical and social shifts in the landscape of HIV/AIDS. We are encouraged to explore where we are now, in relationship to where we have been, looking at the changing demographics of HIV/AIDS to understand how far we have come and how far we have yet to go.”