‘Putting the unvarnished history out there': art and activism during the Aids crisis

In the 1980s, while the Aids pandemic ravaged the LGBTQ+ population of the United States, then president Ronald Reagan failed to help. He didn't even acknowledge the illness existed until 1985, four years into the outbreak, and research has shown that Reagan's government spent four times as much researching cures for Legionnaire's disease than HIV (in spite of the former having an infection and death rate that was dwarfed by Aids).
In the vacuum formed by the failure of official government policy, on-the-ground activism by the LGBTQ+ community was essential. A substantial part of that activism was the Aids quilt. Originally conceived by Harvey Milk intern Cleve Jones, the quilt has gone on to become perhaps the largest community art project ever attempted, and panels are still being added to this day.
In part to recognize the ongoing importance of the quilt, and in part to celebrate the activism that led to it in the first place, art exhibition To Love-To Die; To Fight. To Live. comes to New York City's School of Visual Arts. The show, which includes documentary films on the Aids pandemic, archival posters from the 1980s, other artifacts of the era and an exhibition of contemporary art called Witness, pays tribute to the brave individuals who fought Aids when their government failed to, while highlighting how the pandemic is still active and dangerous in the United States.
'I've run into people who don't know what the Aids quilt is,' said Michael Severance, an organizer on the exhibit and operations manager with the School of Visual Arts. He believes that exhibitions like this one are essential ways to to tell the stories of the crisis and to put the history out there, especially for younger generations who did not live through it.
Aids is still an ongoing problem, in spite of vastly improved medical options for those who have contracted HIV. Severance shared that the disease is particularly active in US south, and is in fact growing in that region. 'The largest proportion of people dying from Aids in America happens to be in the south,' he said. 'It's particularly bad among African-American men. There are a bunch of projects at the National Aids Memorial in San Francisco where they go in and display the quilt to try and bring education and knowledge around Aids.'
Severance pointed out that the roots of the quilt were not about activism but rather memorializing the dead. Because in the beginning Aids primarily impacted communities with less public visibility and less access to resources, there were not as many ways of processing the grief of seeing individuals succumb to the disease. 'I remember losing lots of friends to Aids,' Severance told me, 'but I don't remember going to a lot of funerals.' Thus the quilt provided an important means of remembering the dead, while also building up a community of individuals impacted by the disease, be it by directly suffering an HIV infection or through connections to those who had become infected.
From this communal form of grieving came projects bent more toward activism, which the quilt is now largely associated with. The exhibition includes original pieces by groups like art collective Gran Fury, which appropriated commercial language to fight for those infected with HIV, as well as a still from a Super 8 film by noted artist David Wojnarowicz. 'It's become this amazing form of activism and knowledge exchange,' said Severance. Over the years the quilt has grown and grown, from an estimated 12,000 panels in 1989 to over 50,000 today. A large part of the exhibition is sharing that legacy of community-building, art-making and organizing, and teaching people how to emulate it.
To that end, a major part of this show will be two day-long quilt-making workshops, where members of the community can participate in creating panels of the Aids quilt. 'The quilt workshops are intended to be a space for people to heal and meet and learn and talk about what has been lost,' said Severance. He added the parallels between the dark days of the Aids crisis and the present-day crises being fomented by the Trump administration are quite apparent. 'There is all this homophobia and misogyny that comes with the disease. Those same classifications of people who were stigmatized for HIV are now again in jeopardy. Back in the day they were talking about internment camps for people with HIV/Aids, now we have Guantánamo being used for immigrants.'
Severance believes that the legacy of Aids activism is crucial to this political moment, when trans lives are being erased by president Donald Trump's government, and when support for the broader LGBTQ+ community and communities of color are under assault. He did not expect To Love-To Die; To Fight. To Live., which has been in the works for some time, to be so particularly timely, but that is where he finds himself. 'When we started planning this show, we didn't know where we would be in history at this moment,' he told me. 'With where things are going, it feels very important to me to tell these stories and keep these stories going before they get memory holed or erased.'
As ever, breaking through cultural amnesia is key. Although Aids took hold in the US just 40 years ago, so much has happened since then that key parts of the story are not particularly well-remembered. Severance also indicated that in the time since, other infectious diseases – like Covid, Mpox, and even measles – have themselves become parts of community action. 'Right now, for subjects like these, there's nothing more important than putting the unvarnished history out there.'
Severance hopes that the history of the Aids crisis continues to inspire and instruct, especially right when so many marginalized communities need forms of hope and resistance. 'We have so much to learn from history still,' he said, 'even as these histories become attacked.'
To Love-To Die; To Fight. To Live. is on show at the SVA Flatiron Gallery, New York until 5 April.

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