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Jean Carlomusto, Alexandra Juhasz, and Hugh Ryan offer a tribute to two artists featured in their 2016 video COMPULSIVE PRACTICE who passed away in 2022.
In 2015, Visual AIDS invited the three of us (Jean Carlomusto, Alexandra Juhasz, and Hugh Ryan) to curate an exhibition drawing from their artist registry (among other sources), and to create an accompanying video to be shown around the world on World AIDS Day/Day Without Art 2016. Together, we developed a focus for the exhibition on the “everyday-ness of AIDS,” and for the video, COMPULSIVE PRACTICE, we translated that idea into showcasing under-recognized filmmakers (in a broad definition of the word) who had cataloged their daily experiences with AIDS, or the experiences of their community, in an ongoing manner which we understood as “compulsive,” that is, they couldn’t stop making video about AIDS even if they wanted to; this was how they lived, engaged, healed, and fought.
Two of the artists who allowed us to feature their videos were Carol Leigh (1952–2022) and Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski (1957–2022), both of whom died at the end of last year. These women were visionaries in the fight against AIDS, creating moving, informative, funny, and heartbreaking videos, over many decades, that focused on communities that were too often ignored, or worse, blamed for the crisis: sex workers in the case of Leigh, and women and the Black community in the case of Szczepanski.
