Remembering the AIDS Crisis through Art

By Victoria Kirkham ‘26

October is LGBTQ+ history month. The A&E section strives to share current topics in arts and entertainment with the Milton community, but sometimes we must look back. This month, we remember the AIDS crisis in the United States and honor the artists who worked to change the narrative about HIV/AIDS.

Today, the CDC states that 39 million people worldwide, and over 500,000 people from the US, have died from AIDS. 1.1 million in the US currently live with HIV/AIDS, and each year in the US, 38,000 people contract HIV. Most of our readers were not alive when AIDS killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in the 1980s and '90s, but those of you who were may recall the extremely negative perception towards those infected with what many people at the time called the ‘gay plague.’ Some of you might also remember the protests led by groups such as ACT UP, who urged the government to take action to fight AIDS while people died by the hundreds of thousands; even once a treatment, AZT, was developed, it cost patients approximately $10,000 per year in 1987. In the end, AIDS’ branding as a ‘gay disease’ resulted in countless preventable deaths that devastated and continue to devastate queer–particularly Black and Brown–communities. HIV/AIDS wreaked havoc on artist spaces, particularly in New York City, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. While the government was silent, artists spoke up: destigmatizing the crisis, artists played an integral role in activism and in changing public perception of the disease. 

Many might recognize Keith Haring’s work: notably bright, multicolored, and cartoonish, Haring’s art has a unique energy that’s hard to find elsewhere. Creating art in public spaces, he grew rapidly in popularity in New York City during the 1980s. He focused much of his graffiti-style work on social issues, protesting apartheid in South Africa and expressing anti-war sentiment at a time when there was widespread fear of nuclear war. His unapologetic representations of queer love and desire stood boldly against the general fear and misinformation about LGBTQ+ people and HIV/AIDS that defined much of the AIDS crisis in the US. After his own diagnosis in 1988, he brought awareness to the epidemic and made invaluable contributions to the destigmatization of HIV/AIDS, establishing the Keith Haring Foundation to provide funding and imagery to AIDS organizations and children's programs. One of his most well-known AIDS-related works, Ignorance is Fear–designed on behalf of AIDS activist group ACT UP–depicts the purposeful ignorance of the AIDS epidemic by the public and the administration, condemning their inaction using the powerful and well-known slogan “Silence = Death.” Though Haring died in 1990 of AIDS-related complications, his work remains relevant and recognizable today, serving both as a reminder of the not-so-distant past and as a window into an experience that few lived long enough to document from a personal perspective. 

The AIDS quilt is one of the most well-known art pieces from the AIDS crisis. Comprising today of roughly 50,000 panels memorializing over 110,000 individuals, the quilt is considered the largest community art project in history. The project began in late 1985, when activist Cleve Jones learned of the over 1,000 AIDS deaths in San Francisco; he memorialized them with placards of names taped to a wall, resembling a patchwork quilt. In 1987, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt was born, created to remember those whose lives were too often forgotten. Each panel was hemmed to 3x6 feet–the size of a standard grave–with panels varying in content. Some include bright colors, rhinestones, and complex designs, while some have only a name. The quilt quickly grew as people sent in panels to San Francisco; on October 11, 1987, the quilt, now consisting of 1,920 panels, was displayed for the first time in the National Mall in Washington D.C. In subsequent years, it grew to an enormous size and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for AIDS service organizations. The AIDS quilt has become a global movement, sparking commemorative projects in over 20 countries. In 1996, the quilt was displayed in its entirety for the last time. The full quilt can now be observed online. 

A particularly moving piece of art from the AIDS crisis goes by an unassuming name: “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. However, the installation’s pile of shiny, multicolored candy, which the work’s label states has an ideal weight of 175 pounds, represents Gonzalez-Torres’ partner, Ross Laycock, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1991. The label encourages viewers to take a piece of candy from the pile, and as they do, the pile of candy decreases in size and weight, representing how AIDS slowly consumes a person’s body until there is nothing left. Taking a piece of candy–getting to eat something sweet, typically an act of joy–becomes an act of grief, mourning not only the person whom this portrait portrays but also the artist himself, who died in 1996 of AIDS-related complications.

I encourage readers to research the AIDS crisis in the United States and worldwide, and to engage with art from the AIDS crisis; though I could only get through a few major works here, some other works include Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, David Wojnarowicz’ “Untitled (One Day This Kid...),”, and John S. Boskovich’s Electric Fan (Feel It [...]).