Victory Gardens Theater, Art AIDS America Chicago and Center on Halsted have announced the two-day World AIDS Day event. "We're Still Here: HIV/AIDS Then & Now."
"We're Still Here: HIV/AIDS Then & Now"an HIV/AIDS arts and cultural impact panel and performanceis scheduled to take place on Wed., Nov. 30, at 7:30 p.m. at Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted St. It is free and open to the public.
The panel will include exhibit co-curator Jonathan Katz, Director of Exhibitions Tony Hirschel, Victory Gardens Theater's Director of New Play Development Isaac Gomez, with Hutch Pimentel as moderator. The panel will be followed by Queer, Ill + Okay performances by Phillip X Blacknbrilliant and Joan Giroux, as well as a short film by Xena Ellison and Elizabeth Mputu.
On Thursday, Dec. 1, a curated tour of the Art AIDS America Chicago exhibit at the Alphawood Gallery, 2401 N. Halsted St., will start at 6 p.m., followed by a pre-show reception and storytelling performances at 7 p.m. at Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave. The evening will conclude with a performance of Karen Hartman's Roz and Ray at 7:30 p.m. at Victory Gardens Theater.
This temporary space has been created in a former bank by the Chicago-based Alphawood Foundation to bring the exhibition to its only Midwest venue.
Art AIDS America is the first exhibition to explore how the AIDS crisis forever changed U.S. art. Since the first reports of mysterious illnesses in the early 1980s, HIV and AIDS have touched nearly every resident in some way. While acknowledging and honoring the enormous anger, loss and grief generated by the epidemic, the exhibition refutes the narrative that AIDS is only a tragic tangent in U.S. art. Instead, Art AIDS America offers a story of resilience and beauty revealed through the visual arts, and of the communities that gathered to bring hope and change in the face of a devastating disease.
The Chicago presentation of Art AIDS America will feature more than 100 significant contemporary works in a wide range of mediafrom oil on canvas and photography to three-dimensional installations and video. The artists represented include Judy Chicago, Chloe Dzubilo, Karen Finley, Robert Gober, Félix Gonzalez-Torres, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Derek Jackson, Kia Labeija, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Kiki Smith, Joey Terrill, David Wojnarowicz and Martin Wong. Added to the traveling exhibition exclusively for its Chicago presentation will be works by a variety of other artists, among them major works by famed Chicago Imagist Roger Brown.
See ArtAIDSAmericaChicago.org . Also, see ArtAIDSAmericaChicago.org/events for a full slate of events in connection with Art AIDS America.