Artist Legacies Conversation: Caretaking Legacies in Visual AIDS Archives

Join us next Thursday, April 22, 3-4:30pm EST on ZOOM for a Visual AIDS Artist Legacies Conversation: Caretaking Legacies in Visual AIDS Archives with Tracy Fenix, Artist Engagement & Archive Manager with featured guest artist appearances by Joyce McDonald and Alexander Hernandez!

This conversation will highlight caretaking radical legacies of long-term survivors, BIPOC artists and those passed due to AIDS-related complications, as well as address the often invisibilized, emotional labor of community-based archives. More so, we’ll discuss the importance of Visual AIDS’ current expansion of the Archive Project through community-based ethics, radical empathy, and non-hierarchical leadership structures to emphasize holistic, intersectional engagement and access to the archival collection for BIPOC communities. We’ll focus on artistic case studies of BIPOC artists represented in the Artist+ Registry including Tseng Kwong Chi, Joyce McDonald, and Alexander Hernandez.

We encourage all Visual AIDS artist members and artist's estates to join us to discuss stewarding and preserving the legacies of Visual AIDS artists who've passed due to COVID-19 and AIDS-related complications. There will be short group discussion following the talk.

Please register for the Artist Legacies discussion on ZOOM here.

Alexander Hernandez was born in Oaxaca, Mexico and raised in Grand Junction, Colorado. He received his MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA in 2012, and his BA in Painting & Drawing from Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design in Lakewood, CO in 2007. He lives and works in San Francisco, CA. He works as social worker by day and artist by night

Reverend Joyce McDonald (Born 1951 in Brooklyn, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist, minister, and activist who performed as a teenager with a girl group at the Apollo Theater. Her art practice has much in common with that of Sister Gertrude Morgan and Sister Mary Corita Kent, who also fuse experience with strength, hope, and power. McDonald creates her art in the intimate space of her apartment using humble materials (air dry clay, dirt, tin foil, white out, fake eye lashes, staples) to enshrine her life stories and experiences of family, love, loss, healing, and transformation.