University of Rhode Island
[email protected]
Senior Honors Projects
Honors Program at the University of Rhode Island
5-2008
AIDS Art: Activism on Canvas
Lucy Sumners
University of Rhode Island
, [email protected]
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Recommended Citation
Sumners, Lucy, "AIDS Art: Activism on Canvas" (2008).
Senior Honors Projects.
Paper 77.
Lucy Sumners
Honors Project – AIDS Art: Activism on Canvas
“Art can translate the experience of living with AIDS; art
can define courage and loss; art can ignite activism;
and art can enlarge human understanding so as to
change behavior and limit the spread of infection.”
Hoosen M. Coovadia, M.D.
1
“But, bottom line, this is my own sense of urgency and
need; bottom line, emotionally, even a tiny charcoal
scratching done as a gesture to marks a person’s
response to this epidemic means whole worlds to me if
it is hung in public; bottom line, each and every gesture
carries a reverberation that is meaningful in its diversity;
bottom line, we have to find our own forms of gesture
and communication.
You can never depend on the
mass media to reflect us or our needs or our states of
mind; bottom line, with enough gestures we can
deafen the satellites and lift the curtains surrounding
1
Hoosen Coovadia,
Bodies of Resistance
, ed. Julia Bryan-Wilson and Barbara Hunt (New York:
Visual AIDS, 2000), p. 6.
the control room.” David Wojnarowicz, Close to the
Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
2
AIDS (Acquired immune deficiency syndrome) was first reported in the
United States in 1981.
Since then, AIDS has become a pandemic that has
infected 0.6% of the world’s population, approximately 33.2 million people, and
2.1 million people have died from the disease so far.
Everyone is affected, either
directly or indirectly, by AIDS and as a result protest groups were formed to elicit
awareness and change in how persons with AIDS (PWAs) were and still are
treated and one of the more prominent ways of getting activist groups’ voices
heard by the general population is through protest art or public works or art.
“Our mourning strives to be public, and to engage public institutions, because it
is in the public domain that the value of the lives of our dead loved ones is so
frequently questioned or denied.
Thus the epidemic requires a public art, which
might adequately memorialize and pay respect to our dead,”
3
writes Simon
Watney in an article memorializing the works of Ross Bleckner.
