The Second Annual Visual AIDS Research Symposium

A collaboration between Visual AIDS and MoMA, the second annual Visual AIDS Research Symposium celebrated the lives and legacies of artists documented in the Visual AIDS Archive, the largest collection of images and biographical information about HIV-positive artists.

The event included new research by filmmaker María José Maldonado, writer Ruby Sutton, and scholar Eduardo Carrera, three participants in the Visual AIDS Research Fellowship, highlighting underknown artists who have been lost to AIDS. Artist and activist Joey Terrill and scholar Robb Hernández offered a keynote conversation. Throughout the event, short clips from The Body as an Archive, Visual AIDS’ oral history project, were screened.

The research symposium was planned in conjunction with the installation In the Shadow of the American Dream featuring artworks by Luis Frangella, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Agosto Machado, Marion Scemama, Martin Wong, and David Wojnarowicz.

María José Maldonado is a Salvadorian-Ecuadorian artist born and raised in Queens, NY. Maldonado’s films celebrate the fabulous Latine queer and trans people in her life. Her docushort My Fierce Aunt Bianca screened at Inside Out’s 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival, New York Latino Film Festival, TRANSlations: Seattle Trans Film Festival, Philadelphia Latino Arts & Film Festival, OUTSOUTH Queer Film Festival, and Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival. Maldonado participated in BRIC’s Documentary Intensive Film Lab 2022 and Toronto Queer Film Festival Film Lab 2020, was a Lambda Literary Speculative Fiction Fellow in 2022, played the lead in Anita Abbasi’s award-winning Canadian short Saturday Fuego Diablo (2022), was Sandra Cisneros’s Macondo Writers Workshop Fiction Fellow 2021, was a Leslie-Lohman Museum Artist Fellow in 2020, and was a Barbara Deming Fund 2020 feminist fiction grantee and Queer|Art Mentorship Literature Fellow in 2019, mentored by Charles Rice-González. Maldonado in Queens with her baby Izalco, husband Alejandro, and cat Vinny.

Eduardo Carrera is a curator, art historian, and cultural manager who focuses on Latin American, Latinx, and queer art. He was awarded the ICI Fellowship in 2024, supported by the Marian Goodman Gallery Initiative in honor of the late Okwui Enwezor, and is part of the graduate program in the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught the courses World Film History, The Artists in History: 1400–Now, and Architecture and History. Carrera holds master’s degrees in cultural management and history of art, and completed the Independent Study Program at MACBA, Barcelona. He was the coordinator and chief curator of the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito (2017–22), and has over 10 years of experience in museum management. His writing has been published by Phaidon, Artpress, L’internationale, and others. He has collaborated with institutions such as Visual Aids, the Penn Museum, Wrightwood 659, Matadero Madrid, and MoMA’s Cisneros Institute.

Since the 1970s, Los Angeles–based Chicano artist Joey Terrill has explored the intersection of Latino and gay male identities in his art. A native Angeleno, he studied at Immaculate Heart Collage and California State University, Los Angeles. Living with HIV for 44 years, his art career has parallelled his four decades as an AIDS activist. Last year he was featured in Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living at the Hammer Museum and Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines at the Brooklyn Museum, followed by the solo show Still Here at LA’s Marc Selwyn Gallery in January 2024. Currently his work is included in five shows in California: at the Oakland Museum of California Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in La Jolla; Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), LA; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford.

Robb Hernández is a professor of English and director of fashion studies at Fordham University. He is a public advocate for queer and trans artists of color and serves these communities as a curator, oral historian, arts juror, lecturer, and scholarly advisor to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino. His current book project, Transplanetary: Speculative Arts of the Americas, examines Latinx artists’ responses to the modern space program by fielding different historical epochs, celestial happenings, and cosmologies of the ancient Americas. He is the author of Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde (2019), which offers a queer-of-color retelling of the devastating effects of AIDS on Latinx artist communities in Southern California. His research has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Ruby Sutton is a writer originally from Minnesota. Her journalism appears in Compact, The Believer, and T, among other magazines. Her fiction appears in Agora, Hobart Pulp, and Serpent Journal. She is currently at work on a novel.