The Brooklyn Rail

On a Wednesday evening in early June, a festive crowd gathers in the West Village for the 2024 Visual AIDS Vanguard Awards, affectionately known as VAVA. The award honors individuals within the Visual AIDS community whose achievements strengthen the cultural history of art and the AIDS movement. An annual event since 2006, the evening’s revenue helps fund the ongoing mission of Visual AIDS, a thirty-six-year old organization committed to raising AIDS awareness, uplifting the work of artists living with HIV/AIDS, and preserving the legacies of those who have died from the disease. Galas and fundraisers can, by nature, intimidate, but at this one—much like the organization it benefits—a sense of belonging is easily found amid the glitter jackets, lamé suits, and cat-eye glasses that combine into one holistically chic look. Hipsters chat with seniors. Uptown benefactors clink glasses with rising artists as all sit down to a dinner served family-style. As wine is poured, Marguerite Van Cook, the punk rock musician, gallerist, writer, artist, and academic—who is also the Visual AIDS Board President—thanks everyone for coming to celebrate the evening’s three honorees: early member Philip Yenawine, artist Lola Flash, and performance artist and writer Brian Butterick (a.k.a. Hattie Hathaway). Van Cook is stoked that John Kelly and Doug Bressler of Rimbaud Hattie will be playing music, and that Paris Alexander and Buffy will present an homage to Butterick’s performance work with Blacklips Performance Cult’s. In describing the work of Visual AIDS, she beams with enthusiasm. “We get to support and celebrate an incredible community of artists living with HIV, and we are charged with the responsibility to honor and remember so many artists who have been taken from us by AIDS … Our job is to stop people from being forgotten.”

Van Cook introduces Kyle Croft, who served as Visual AIDS’s Programs Director for five years before moving into the role of Executive Director a few months ago. Croft speaks with the ease of someone whose gaze is fixed not on his own advancement, but on the work he is doing and the community he serves. In his remarks, he describes growing up alongside Visual AIDS, starting as an intern and attending his first Visual AIDS event just after he arrived in New York. What drew him to the organization, he says, was its radical inclusivity and openness “to any and all self-identified artists living with HIV, regardless of education, exhibition history, or market value. This simple principle upends so much about the art world and centers on the one thing that artists need the most: acknowledgement and validation.”

How that mission manifests itself within the context of the art world becomes clearer as Croft presents the evening’s first award to honoree Philip Yenawine, one of the earliest members of Visual AIDS. Yenawine was instrumental in launching the organization’s inaugural Day Without Art in 1989, convincing the Museum of Modern Art—where he was then employed—to participate, and using that commitment as leverage to beseech other institutions to join in speaking about AIDS as well.

In an emotional moment, Yenawine joins Croft on stage to receive his award, an original red ribbon created in 1991 by the Visual AIDS Artists Caucus. It floats in a case designed by art framer Barry Frier at Baobab Frames. Holding back tears, Yenawine recounts, “I lost most of the men I thought I’d grow old with during the years when AIDS was fatal … It remains hard to describe what it took to get up every day, put one foot in front of another, do our workaday tasks, and take on the varied work of activism too. We forged a community for the first time. But one thing is clear: we did what we had to do, with no thought of being remembered for it forty years later.”

Visual AIDS was formed in 1988 by a small group of curators and arts writers who were confounded by the lack of agency mustered by the art world in the face of the ongoing AIDS epidemic. These were risky times: what became known as the “culture wars” were in full swing, with conservative senators Alfonse D’Amato of New York and Jesse Helms of North Carolina leading Congress in a crusade against individual artists and art institutions large and small. In 1989, just a few months after Visual AIDS was established, funding for the National Endowment for the Arts was cut in retaliation for an exhibition featuring Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987), deemed blasphemous in Congress, which had been partially funded by the NEA. Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibit at Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC was canceled, too, after falling into Helm’s crosshairs. The National Endowment for the Arts then rescinded a 10,000 dollar grant to Artists Space in response to Nan Goldin’s 1989–90 AIDS-related exhibition, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. Between the threat of right-wing censorship and the decimation of lives within the New York arts community by AIDS, it was easy to despair and difficult to know what to do.

“It’s really hard to convey the intensity of those times,” recalls Visual AIDS founding member Robert Atkins, who was then a staff columnist at the Village Voice. “People would talk about Rolodex cards, the contact lists they kept even though so many people had died. I still never eliminate people from my contact list, no matter what they’ve died from. We’d all been doing all kinds of things, whether it was going to ACT UP meetings or volunteering to shop for groceries, walk pets. But I think also we felt like we had talents to tap that weren’t being used.”

Atkins was invited to meet with Gary Garrels, who was then Director of Programs at Dia Art Foundation; Tom Sokolowski, director of the Grey Art Gallery (now the Grey Art Museum) at New York University; and William Olander, Senior Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, to discuss ways to activate networks across non-profit art spaces and institutions in order to bring attention to the ongoing but largely ignored and mismanaged medical emergency.

Yenawine, who at the time was Director of Education at MoMA, joined the group for its second gathering, offering use of both the museum’s Xerox machines—crucially needed in an era of printed communications—and its trustees meeting room for gatherings that quickly expanded to include other curators, directors, writers, and historians from arts organizations and museums across New York. Village Voice art critic and curator John Perreault attended meetings, as did artist Martha Wilson and art historian and writer Arlene Raven; all had been members of the Art Workers Coalition which, in 1969, pressured New York museums to institute free admission days and more inclusive exhibition policies. Conversations focused on how the newly formed organization could similarly galvanize art spaces and museums to draw attention to the impact of AIDS.

In mid-October of 1989, Visual AIDS circulated a press release announcing “A Day Without Art: A National Day of Action and Mourning,” to be held on December 1st, coinciding with the second World Health Organization’s AIDS Awareness Day. At the time of its printing, more than four hundred institutions promised to participate. As word spread across art and AIDS networks, that number continued to grow until, on the first of December, over seven hundred museums, alternative spaces, commercial galleries, university art centers, theater groups, and dance companies across the country closed their doors, darkened their spaces, covered artworks, or delayed performances. Memorial services, lectures, and readings were held, and educational information about AIDS prevention and care was offered. “What was most striking to us was the hunger for doing something,” says Atkins. “I remember spending the day on the phone talking to journalists. It far exceeded our not-very-clear expectations. It couldn’t have been more exhilarating.”

In “Scene and Heard,” his biweekly column in the Village Voice, Atkins reported that the events of the day included a meeting between a delegation of sixteen art professionals, artists, and AIDS activists—a group that included HIV-positive people and people with AIDS—and National Endowment for the Arts chairman John Frohnmayer. Among them was choreographer Bill T. Jones, whose company planned to postpone a performance scheduled that evening at the Kennedy Center until 12:01 a.m. (which would technically be December 2nd). Jones asked that the NEA support his company through any financial or legal complications their decision might incur. The group also asked that the NEA include information about AIDS to its grant applicants and that it endorse the following year’s Day Without Art.

In 1990, as the number of institutions and alliances participating globally in Day Without Art continued to increase, Visual AIDS organized A Night Without Light. From 7:45 p.m. until 8:00 p.m., the architectural lights of historic Manhattan buildings, bridges, and Broadway marquees were turned off, darkening the city skyline in memory of lives lost to AIDS. The following spring, the Visual AIDS Artists Caucus implemented plans for a widely distributable symbol of AIDS awareness: The Red Ribbon Project. A six-inch loop of folded grosgrain ribbon fastened with a safety pin—what would become the iconic red ribbon symbolizing AIDS awareness—was first seen by television viewers in June of 1991 on the lapel of Jeremy Irons, host of the 45th Annual Tony Awards. In a recording of the CBS broadcast, red ribbons can be spotted here and there being worn by nominees and presenters; in the broadcast of the awards in 1992, the following year, they are ubiquitous. Prioritizing message over cost, Visual AIDS decided that the red ribbon would never be copyrighted and that it would be made available at no charge. To keep up with demand, Visual AIDS volunteers held “ribbon bees,” creating thousands of red ribbons that were distributed nationally.

The ribbons proved how powerfully a visual image could disseminate awareness and information about AIDS. For the fourth Day Without Art in 1992, Visual AIDS asked artists Barbara Kruger and Glenn Ligon to create images that could be printed on posters and Xeroxed broadsheets, which were then sent to museums and other groups to give out on December 1. Like the ribbons, these images were intentionally not copyrighted so that they could be endlessly shared, though they required teams of volunteers to print and distribute them. “The pleasure was in the doing,” Atkins says of the work involved. “I remember sitting in a parking lot behind the post office rolling posters. You had to roll them and put them into tubes, and they had to be in the mail by a certain date in November. It was drizzling, and somebody had a boombox and it was just a very sweet moment that at the time was quite annoying, but even then you could kind of laugh at it.”

As the fifth anniversary of Day Without Art approached, artist Frank Moore and writer David Hirsh led a committee that proposed creating an archive that would be maintained by Visual AIDS to preserve the work of artists who had succumbed to AIDS. Personal papers, press clippings, CVs, correspondence, and other ephemera from estates, families, and friends of artists who had died were collected. Photographers visited the studios and homes of artists living with HIV to make slides and transparencies of their work. The Archive Project officially launched on December 1, 1994 with an exhibition celebrating the first ten artists whose work was collected.

Today, the physical archive is housed in the offices of Visual AIDS in Chelsea. Membership in the archive is open to anyone who identifies as a visual artist living with HIV as well as the estates of those who have died. Access is open to the public. Curators, art historians, writers, artists, and educators regularly use it for research. “We want people to come and read and visit the archive and to learn about what happened,” Van Cook says. “They can learn something from us, or not learn, but just become aware of it, incorporate it, steal some of it.”

On a weekday morning a few weeks after the Vanguard Awards, Croft is in the Visual AIDS office helping an art history student locate an artist’s file in the archive. Together, they lay a collection of drawings and letters out on a table in the reading room before Croft leaves her alone to study the items and jot down notes in a kraft paper notebook. “Anything in the art world after the nineties has been shaped by AIDS,” Croft says. “People are hungry for this history. What is special about Visual AIDS is that we’re historically-minded with the archive.” Which is not to say that stewardship of the archive has in any way supplanted Visual AIDS’s role as an activist organization. Croft says he likes to think of it as a “smooshing together” of what more typically exist as separate types of entities. “Most institutions that are set up to steward documents or histories are not themselves engaging in activism, but we strive to stay connected to the present by speaking about HIV today. The work we do is an exchange between the two.”

The layout of the Visual AIDS office reflects this duplexity: next to the reading room, which holds a small library as well as the archive, an inviting meeting space is adorned with past Day Without Art broadsheets. A sofa, chairs, and a conference table accommodate community-activism planning sessions but also provide a place for visitors to informally hang out and connect. “In my early years at Visual AIDS, I was continually excited to be sitting in these rooms with people who I had read about as historical figures or as artists,” says Croft. “This sense of embodied community is really powerful and speaks to the fact that Visual AIDS has provided something for this community over many decades.”

“It’s definitely a community place,” says Kia LaBeija, a contemporary artist whose work is in the archive. “I just stop by and say hi and see who else is around. And you’ll see another artist who just decided to drop by, too, and it’s like, ‘Oh, this is what we’re working on, are you interested in participating in this thing?’” Carlos Gutierrez-Solana, Treasurer of Visual AIDS, agrees. “It’s a community center without being declared one. It has an open-door policy without advertising it.” A retired artist and museum professional, Gutierrez-Solana was working for the New York State Council on the Arts when Visual AIDS was first established and was close to its founding members, Frank Moore in particular. “I knew what was going on because I would go up to Frank’s house in the country all the time. But because of my NYSCA affiliation, I could not be directly involved with the development of Visual AIDS, since I was funding them. And then in ’89, I was diagnosed as HIV-positive.” Gutierrez-Solana has been an artist member in the archive since its inception in 1994. “Because I’m in the archive, it means that I’m not going to die. Whether I do or not, there’s a place where there’s a record that I was here. And someone will get to look at my work and make their own conclusions. That is at the heart of Visual AIDS.”

Van Cook describes the impact the archive holds for those who have lost people to AIDS:

I’m looking at artifacts of my friends, and there’s a distance that comes with the time. They’re becoming something different culturally, you know? And yet they’re still that same person to me, and it’s so poignant. I wish everybody could catch a little bit of that intimacy, and I think the archive does that. It allows people to have some of the intimacy that we had, and to understand we lost people, and that those people were creative in such a huge way.

When I sat with Gutierrez-Solana in the Visual AIDS reading room, he reinforced Van Cook’s view. “I always say Visual AIDS was created out of tragedy and grief, and it’s evolved, but we still carry that. We have all [these artists lost to AIDS] in there,” Gutierrez-Solana says, gesturing toward the archival boxes that line the wall. “And we keep people from disappearing.”

The Artist Registry, which launched in 2012, is the online component of the Visual AIDS Archive. It provides artists like Gutierrez-Solana with their own web page where they can easily swap out images of their work or update their bios. They also offer a grant for artists who need to digitize time-based media. “I’ve recently posted some things that I’ve been working on and I have more images that I want to add,” says LeBeija. “But you can also do a deep dive or really zone in on something very particular, really engage with the work. Knowing that the work is there, it’s safe, there’s a place where it will always exist in dialogue with other artists living now or who have lived with HIV [is so important].”

Fostering this dialogue, Visual AIDS invites curators to create featured galleries which function as online exhibitions. There is also a yearly research fellowship that supports writers and academics producing original scholarship based on research in the archive. Since 1995, Visual AIDS has been collaborating with other non-profit spaces to produce art exhibitions featuring work by artists living with HIV. They also publish exhibition catalogues, catalogues raisonnés, and monographs. A 2021 monograph on artist Darrel Ellis, whose work had remained unseen since his death in 1992, led to a touring retrospective exhibition and the acquisition of his work by major museums. Visual AIDS also publishes “Duets,” a paperback series of conversations. According to Croft, the “Duets” series is published in pairs, with “one book about an artist who is deceased and another book about an artist who is living. In the case of a living artist, putting that artist in conversation with someone else, but really centering their voice. If the artist is deceased, we have two people speaking about them.” LaBeija spoke with Julie Tolentino for a “Duets” in 2018; Julie Ault and David Deitcher conducted extensive archival research and interviews with colleagues and friends of founding member William Olander, who died in 1989, additionally excerpting his writings for their 2021 book.

In the case of artists and communities who work in non-material forms such as oral traditions, performance, or community-based work, Visual AIDS is building The Body As An Archive, an oral history project begun in 2020. Croft is working on a writing project to document the history of Day Without Art, which, since 1998, has been stylized as Day With(out) Art—the parentheses were added in response to changes in the epidemic and the long-term possibilities antiretrovirals and other medical interventions currently provide. With plans to expand the archive both physically and virtually, Jacs Rodriguez has been added to the full-time staff as Community Archivist alongside Croft, Development Director Shawn Escarciga, and Programs Manager Blake Paskal.

Marking the twenty-fifth year of Day With(out) Art, Visual AIDS began an annual video commission in 2014, working with groups of seven artists or art collaboratives to create short-form films based on a shared theme. The videos are available in a downloadable link to universities, art spaces, and museums, and are screened as a program on or around December 1 each year at over one hundred international venues, with a premiere screening usually held at the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles before becoming accessible on the Visual AIDS website.

Every year since 1998, Visual AIDS has also produced Postcards From the Edge, an exhibition and benefit sale of original works on postcard-sized paper to which any artist, established or emerging, professional or solely passionate, can contribute. Each work is priced at 100 dollars and is exhibited anonymously. Only after a postcard is purchased is the identity of its maker revealed. According to Gutierrez-Solana, who has volunteered to oversee the production of Postcards for more than twenty years, approximately 1,500 postcards were donated last year, and, as is always the case, almost every one of them sold. This, in addition to the Vanguard Awards, keeps things going as the work reaches beyond the creative to include the pragmatic: Visual AIDS has awarded over 670,000 dollars in Artist Support Grants to artist members. Each 400 dollar grant was originally distributed in the form of gift cards for art materials at Blick Art Materials or B&H Photo; since 2023, they have distributed Visa gift cards, allowing for broader spending in recognition of necessities like travel, child care, or paying rent. It’s a simple fix, but one that speaks to the nimbleness the organization has maintained, even as it has grown over the past thirty-six years.

“I think what is special about Visual AIDS is that who we’re working for is constantly shifting,” Croft says.

We’re trying to tell a story about this history, and we’re engaging with the people who lived it. There’s also a general public who is now learning about this history, and they are part of our work. But then we also strive to be oriented towards the present and the future and thinking about the ways in which many of the artists in the archive were responding to political conditions that have not changed or resolved very much. Not only what it means to engage with the artistic histories that are in these boxes, but to be constantly building bridges to the present. What does it mean to really embody the politics of that movement in the present?

One way might be in the organization’s increasing attention to the woman-identifying artists who have been affected by HIV/AIDS. “I’m the first woman to become president of what’s been historically a gay men’s organization, which is such an honor and very touching,” Van Cook says. “And it’s allowed me to open up some of the narratives about women that we lost to AIDS. One of the things Visual AIDS does is talk about the women that died of AIDS, the women that are living with HIV, the different way it inhabits the body of women and the fact that women of color are so marginalized.”

LOVE POSITIVE WOMEN (LPW) is a paper-making workshop begun by Visual AIDS artist member Jessica Whitbread in 2013. Each year, the program produces close to seven hundred handmade valentines that are mailed around the globe to women living with HIV. In recent years, MoMA PS1 has hosted a weekend pop-up exhibition of the cards to increase the project’s visibility before they are sent in the mail. Inspired by Love Positive Women, Brooklyn AIDS activist and Visual AIDS Artist Member Shirlene Cooper used funding she received from her Artist Support Grant to buy art supplies and invite a small group of women to make art together in her living room. Since 2018, the Women’s Empowerment Art Therapy Workshop has been meeting on a monthly basis to share their experiences, listen to guest presentations on topics like wellness, housing, and activism, and to make art projects ranging from mask-making to stained glass window design to textile painting. About twenty women regularly attend. Programs Manager Blake Paskal has invited artists to do workshops with the group and has arranged for museums to host evening tours of exhibitions, after which the women make art together and share dinner. He says that although many of the women live in Brooklyn, it is not uncommon for them to have never visited the Brooklyn Museum or other art spaces. “I’m interested in bringing art to people who haven’t had opportunities for art making, or to just experience art at all,” he says. “A lot of the issues of equity in general in the art world are based around people even getting to think of themselves as an artist. If they never had opportunities to travel to art museums, how could they think of being an artist as a reality?”

In addition to the Women’s Empowerment Art Therapy Workshop, Paskal schedules trips to museums for the wider group of artist members. He invites artists to create work in the Visual AIDS space and works on a range of online programming, which includes highlighting the work of artist members and facilitating opportunities for them to present their work. “The potential of art to be a thing that brings people together, creates different conversations than what is sometimes possible in the world,” he says.

Paskal reports that a new iteration of the Last Address Tribute Walk, a walking tour of New York neighborhoods which recognizes artists and performers lost to AIDS by stopping at the places where they last lived, community spaces, and culture hubs, is in the planning stages. The event features tributes, readings, and songs from friends and families of those honored. In September, Visual AIDS supported the Wojnarowicz Foundation, NYC AIDS memorial, and P.P.O.W gallery in their presentation of a performance of David Wojnarowicz’s autofiction monologues, The Waterfront Journals (published posthumously in 1997) and a candlelight march to mark what would have been the artist’s seventieth birthday. There is also a panel discussion and a research symposium scheduled later in the fall. When asked about how so many initiatives can be produced in a single year, Paskal laughs. “That’s one of the wildest parts of Visual AIDS to me. I don’t even think our colleagues at other institutions necessarily understand how much we do with such a small staff.”

Looking to the future, Croft is excited to build on the substantial achievements of Visual AIDS within the friction of an artist support organization that is also an activist organization. In terms of Visual AIDS’s ongoing impact as an activist organization, Croft says that is always being navigated—AIDS is, of course, not over—and that at this moment “there’s a lot of interest in how AIDS activism is related to the Black Lives Matter movement or what’s happening in Palestine. Basically anything that’s happening in contemporary politics, there’s probably some kind of intersection or resonance with our work.” As the archive continues to grow, Rodriguez is creating a catalogue of the archive to facilitate deeper engagement with the histories it holds. The organization is also forging new relationships with museums and other institutions, with material on loan to the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, among others. While the coexistence of activism and support programs within one organization may at times seem incongruous, Visual AIDS has never strayed from its original mission to raise AIDS awareness and create dialogue around HIV/AIDS-related issues. “This organization has always thought of itself as an activist organization,” says Gutierrez-Solana, “but I think a lot of people don’t understand that there’s all kinds of activism. And quite honestly, my being alive today is an activist act. This organization existing is an activist act.”