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Lost & Found: Safer Sex Activism at ONE Gallery features Visual AIDS' Play Smart Trading Cards and several works from our Broadsides series.
Play Smart trading cards are an honest and straightforward approach to promote harm reduction, HIV testing, pre and post exposure prophylaxis and raise awareness around HIV/AIDS. Play Smart features fun, sexy and creative trading cards, packaged with condoms and lube. The back of each trading card features information to help you play smart.
Visual AIDS began producing Play Smart in 2010 in conversation with Dr. Demetre Daskalakis at The Men’s Sexual Health Project (M*SHP), and have since work with individuals from Streetwise & Safe, Sero Project, GMHC, SRLP, and other AIDS service and LGBTQ organizations, to help develop and distribute Play Smart nationally. Additional Play Smart trading cards aim to create positive images of different bodies and strive to reach our diverse communities.
Visual AIDS began producing small 8.5" x 11" Broadsides in 1992. These artist designed AIDS awareness projects are created with the intent of being easily reproducible, graphic heavy, black and white deisgns that can be photocopied and shared.
Lost & Found: Safer Sex Activism examines thirty years of inspiring and defiant safer sex and harm reduction activism. The exhibition presents safer sex posters, comics, brochures, videos, PSAs, and safer sex and clean needle kits, among other archival items, all from the collections at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.
While at the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s widespread public perception linked AIDS to gay men and intravenous drug users, Lost & Found reveals how activists sought to educate and empower varying publics about the pervasive epidemic. Utilizing novel and accessible forms, safer sex activists disseminated information across cultural, economic, linguistic, and class divisions. Rather than stigmatize sexuality, these educational projects often went hand-in-hand with sex positive practices. While the majority of materials were produced in the 1980s and 1990s, the exhibition connects these histories to the ongoing AIDS crisis through contemporary artists and activist projects.