Art AIDS America
Art AIDS America is a publication and traveling exhibition organized by Tacoma Art Museum in partnership with the Bronx Museum of the Arts and co-curated by Dr. Jonathan D. Katz, director of the Visual Studies Doctoral Program at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), and Rock Hushka, chief curator and curator of contemporary and Northwest art at Tacoma Art Museum. As the first comprehensive overview and reconsideration of thirty years of art made in response to the AIDS epidemic in the United States, this book foregrounds the role of HIV/AIDS in shifting the development of American art away from the cool conceptual foundations of postmodernism and toward a new, more insistently political and autobiographical voice. Art AIDS America surveys more than 100 works of American art from the early 1980s to the present, reintroducing and exploring the whole spectrum of artistic responses to HIV/AIDS, from in-your-face activism to quiet elegy. Contributors include Bill Arning; Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed; Patrick "Pato" Hebert; Glen Helfand; Robb Hernández and Joey Terrill; Teresa Bramlette Reeves; David Roman, Nelson Santos, Amy Sadao, and Ted Kerr; Sarah Schulman; and Sur Rodney (Sur).
Visual AIDS
Founded in 1988, Visual AIDS is the only contemporary arts organization fully committed to raising AIDS awareness and creating dialogue around HIV issues today, by producing and presenting visual art projects, exhibitions, public forums, and publications—while assisting artists living with HIV/AIDS. They are committed to preserving and honoring the work of artists with HIV/AIDS and the artistic contributions of the AIDS movement. Visual AIDS maintains the Artist Registry and Archive Project, the largest database and registry of works by visual artists with HIV/AIDS. Ed Aulerich-Sugai was one of the first beneficiaries of Visual AIDS.
Day Without Art
Day Without Art, organized by Visual AIDS in 1989, was a response to the worsening AIDS crisis. Curators, artists, and arts professionals took action to celebrate the lives and achievements of lost colleagues and friends, encourage caring for all people with AIDS, educate diverse publics about HIV infection, and find a cure. Initially, more than 800 arts organizations, museums, and galleries throughout the United States participated by covering or removing artworks from display and replacing them with information about HIV and safer sex; locking their doors or dimming their lights; and producing exhibitions, programs, readings, memorials, rituals, and performances. For the past three decades, the Day Without Art has highlighted art projects focused on the AIDS pandemic and encouraged programming that includes artists living with HIV. For the 1991 commemoration of World AIDS Day, Aulerich-Sugai series Power in Storage: Samurai Masks and Helmets was displayed at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.