Caretaking in the Archive

For Caretaking in the Archive, Visual AIDS invited archivists, artists, and cultural workers to discuss how they have cared for the legacies of artists who are living with HIV or who have been lost to the AIDS epidemic. The conversation was moderated by Tracy Fenix, Artist+ Registry & Archive Associate at Visual AIDS, and Caitlin McCarthy, Archivist at The Center.

Opening out from traditional notions of archiving and preservation, this program considered how artists and archivists use caretaking strategies to hold space for underserved voices and reanimate subtle gestures often overlooked in cultural histories.

Katherine Cheairs reflected on co-curating Metanoia: Transformation Through AIDS Archives & Activism, an archival exhibition that foregrounds the pioneering legacy of HIV/AIDS prison activism by Joann Walker and Katrina Haslip, whose groundbreaking work at the Central California Women's Facility and Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York remains an instructive tool for contemporary activist work.

Shane Aslan Selzer shared recent work from the Social Action Archive Committee’s engagement with the Carl George/Felix Gonzalez-Torres/Ross Laycock Archive at Visual AIDS, considering the stakes of bringing private and personal documents into the public.

Muna Tseng spoke to the relationship between her creative practice as a choreographer and performer and her work as executor and caretaker of her brother Tseng Kwong Chi’s estate.

Visual AIDS’ Artist+ Registry & Archive Project honors and supports the work and legacy of over 900 HIV-positive artists. Through our website, public programs, publications, and other projects, we aim to foreground the voices of artists living with HIV and to activate the legacies of those who have been lost to the epidemic. This program extended from Activating the Archive Project, a 2018 panel discussion that revisited the founding and evolution of Visual AIDS’ archive.

Participant Bios:

Katherine “Kat” Cheairs is a filmmaker, educator, curator, activist and community artist. Kat’s areas of interest and research include: HIV & AIDS; visual culture; media arts therapy; community arts; and, critical race theory in art education. Ms. Cheairs is a co-curator of Metanoia: Transformation Through AIDS Archives and Activism, an archival exhibition focusing on the contributions of Black cis women, transwomen of color, and women of color actvists on HIV/AIDS activism from the early 1990s to the present. Kat is a member of the What Would An HIV Doula Do? Collective and the producer and director of the documentary, Ending Silence, Shame & Stigma: HIV/AIDS in the African American Family. Ms. Cheairs has a Master of Fine Arts in Film and Television Production from the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts at Chapman University. Kat’s new project, In This House, currently in development, is a video installation exploring HIV/AIDS narratives through the Black body.

Tracy Fenix is the Artist+ Registry & Archive Associate at Visual AIDS. Fenix supports local, national and international artists living with HIV and AIDS and estates of artists lost due to AIDS-related complications and maintains the physical archives and digital collections held in Visual AIDS’ Artist+ Registry and Archive Project. Fenix has supported arts community with organizing public programs and exhibitions that focus on a broad range of themes including queer identity politics; immigration and migration narratives; intergenerational trauma and healing; social engagement and activism; environmental racism; and public memory of historical spaces and ephemera. Fenix is a 2019 Fellow for the National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures (NALAC) Leadership Institute.

Shane Aslan Selzer is an artist whose practice engages micro-communities to expand on larger social entanglements such as critical exchange, critique and failure. In the past year, Selzer’s collaborative video work has been exhibited at Tabakalera in San Sebastian, Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, and Julia Stoschek Collection in Berlin. Selzer is the founding editor of the Social Action Archive Committee (SAAC), whose work has been exhibited at University Art Museum, Albany NY, and the Children’s Museum of the Arts. SAAC is currently developing a new project with The Carl George/Ross Laycock/Felix Gonzalez-Torres Archive at Visual AIDS in New York while in residency at Triangle Arts Association, Governor’s Island, NY. Selzer is the Co-Editor of, What We Want Is Free: Critical Exchanges in Recent Art (SUNY Press, 2014), and part-time faculty at Parsons, The New School for Design.

Caitlin McCarthy is the archivist at The LGBT Community Center. Before joining The Center as its first staff archivist, they worked in Museum Archives at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and earned their Master of Library Science degree, with a certificate in Archives and Preservation of Cultural Heritage Materials, at The City University of New York, Queens College.

Muna Tseng was born in Hong Kong, educated in Canada, and has been living and working in New York since arriving in 1977 with her brother, the late photographer Tseng Kwong Chi. Muna is a choreographer, performer, and founder of Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc., which collaborates with contemporary artists in New York and tours worldwide. After the death of Kwong Chi in 1990 due to AIDS related causes, Muna has managed his photographic estate, taking on the mission of archive conservation, preservation, and provision of access to legacy materials for researchers, scholars as well as curating exhibitions and publications with museums and galleries world-wide. As an artist, Muna is interested in archive as a living art, and has created an award-winning dance-theater solo performance SlutForArt, a collaboration with Ping Chong, using photographs by Tseng Kwong Chi, choreographed and danced by Muna, to reflect on the life of her brother as a sibling and an artist in the 1980s. Earlier this year, Visual AIDS honored Muna Tseng for her work with the annual VAVA VOOM Award. In 2017, Muna was recognized with a Liberty Award by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, along with the Keith Haring Foundation. She has been invited to give her illustrated talk on the intersection of art, dance, and being Chinese American in the downtown 1980s East Village scene, at museums including the Museum of Modern Art, Seoul Museum of Art, and the Nassau County Museum of Art.