Upcoming Event
Catalogue Launch | Ministry: Reverend Joyce McDonald
The Bronx Museum
Celebrate the release of the catalogue Ministry: Reverend Joyce McDonald with a panel discussion bringing together curator Kyle Croft, Chloe Hayward (art therapist and professor), and Katherine Cheairs (artist and Visual AIDS Board Member).
The conversation will explore key themes from the catalogue, including the therapeutic possibilities of art, creative practices that thrive outside the traditional art market, and the role of churches and visual culture in the history of Black AIDS activism.
Published by Visual AIDS in collaboration with The Bronx Museum, Ministry: Reverend Joyce McDonald is the first book dedicated to McDonald’s sculptural practice and features essays by Croft and Dr. Jareh Das, alongside a conversation between McDonald and fellow artist Rafael Sánchez. The catalogue is available to purchase for $35 on the Visual AIDS store.
This program is presented in partnership with The Bronx Museum on the occasion of Ministry: Reverend Joyce McDonald, the first museum exhibition devoted to the artist’s work. A longtime Visual AIDS Artist Member, McDonald began working with clay in 1997 through an art therapy program, shortly after her diagnosis with HIV. She quickly recognized the medium’s potential for healing and transformation. Working intuitively, she allows figures to emerge from the clay, giving form to memories and emotion while processing experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and illness.
Participant Bios
Katherine “Kat” Cheairs, MFA is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, researcher, and videomaker whose work concerns the Diasporic Black Body, memory, HIV & AIDS art and activism, quantum physics, archives, liminality, and embodiment. Kat is the producer and director of Voices at the Gate for Day With(out) Art 2021: Enduring Care and Ending Silence, Shame, and Stigma: HIV/AIDS in the African American Family (2012).
Kyle Croft is the executive director of Visual AIDS where he works to preserve the legacies of artists lost to AIDS and support a global community of artists living with HIV. He has edited volumes on Darrel Ellis, Frederick Weston, and William Olander, and holds an MA in art history from Hunter College.
Chloe Hayward is an educator, cultural producer, and art therapist based in New York. She is currently a graduate professor in the Creative Arts Therapy Department at the School of Visual Arts and Syracuse University and was formerly the Director of Education at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her work exists at the intersection of art therapy and art education and applies the power of the creative arts process to heal, bring awareness and promote social change, equity, and liberation.
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