World AIDS Day
In honor of World AIDS Day (today), our building features an AIDS awareness banner designed by late artist and Artpace alum Chuck Ramirez (1962-2010), whose art and life were impacted by being HIV positive.
World AIDS Day is often synonymous with Day With(out) Art, which began on December 1, 1989, as the national day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis. Since then, it has grown into a collaborative project in which an estimated 8,000 national and international museums, galleries, art centers, AIDS service organizations, libraries, high schools, and colleges take part. Visual AIDS is the only contemporary arts organization fully committed to HIV prevention and AIDS awareness through producing and presenting visual art projects, while assisting artists living with HIV/AIDS. It is committed to preserving and honoring the work of artists with HIV/AIDS and the artistic contributions of the AIDS movement.
The Visual AIDS website currently features notes on a steady decline, a compelling web gallery curated by Steven Evans. The images, selected from the Visual AIDS Frank Moore Archive Project, includes works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (an inaugural resident of Artpace’s International Artist-in-Residence program) and Ramirez. Read Evans’s curatorial statement here.
Photo credit: Chuck Ramirez’s World AIDS Day banner, created in 2002. Photo by Wendi Kimura
Wendi Kimura
Wendi Kimura is the Publications Coordinator at Artpace, editing and managing our written and printed matter, as well as our social media. She enjoys a proper pronoun-antecedent agreement and is an absolute serial comma devotee. Wendi hearts Hi-Chew candy, Texas Monthly magazine, The Rub on Brooklyn Radio, and internet cats (like these).