STILL BEGINNING: Brooklyn Museum Screening and Discussion

STILL BEGINNING: The 30th Annual Day With(out) Art

For the thirtieth annual Day With(out) Art, Visual AIDS partnered with the Brooklyn Museum and The Studio Museum in Harlem to present STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven newly commissioned videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic by Shanti Avirgan, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Carl George, Viva Ruiz, Iman Shervington, Jack Waters/Victor F.M. Torres, and Derrick Woods-Morrow.

The seven short videos ranged in subject from anti-stigma work in New Orleans to public sex culture in Chicago, highlighting pioneering AIDS activism and staging intergenerational conversations. Recalling Gregg Bordowitz’s reminder that “THE AIDS CRISIS IS STILL BEGINNING,”* the video program resisted narratives of resolution or conclusion, considering the continued urgency of HIV/AIDS in the contemporary moment while revisiting resonant cultural histories from the past three decades.

The Brooklyn Museum First Saturday screening was followed by a conversation with artists Iman Shervington and Derrick Woods-Morrow, moderated by writer Mathew Rodriguez. The program was organized in collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem, marking the sixth year of an ongoing partnership around Day With(out) Art.

Click below to watch the post-screening discussion at the Brooklyn Museum. Click here to watch STILL BEGINNING.

For more information about STILL BEGINNING and the history of Day With(out) Art, see here.

*Gregg Bordowitz, The AIDS Crisis is Still Beginning (2019) was recently exhibited as part of "I Wanna Be Well," a retrospective curated by Stephanie Snyder for the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College and the Art Institute of Chicago. Hear Bordowitz discuss the work here.

Participant Biographies

Iman Shervington is the Director of Media & Communications at the Institute of Women & Ethnic Studies (IWES), a public health non-profit. Through IWES, Iman has utilized her script development, cinematography, directing, producing, and editing skills to create over 50 short films and PSAs, a web-series, a feature-length documentary, two feature-length narrative films and an award-winning podcast. In 2016, Iman was chosen as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Leader to promote a culture of health in New Orleans and she received the award as a "Changemaker" in the New Orleans-based Millennial Awards.

Derrick Woods-Morrow’s work is a meditation on deviation and disruption. Currently based in Chicago, his artistic practice is realized through photographic transfers, digital video collage, ceramics, and narrative performance. Exploring modes of representation, he salvages, and displaces raw material from sites of historical significance and trauma, reimagines their future purpose and denies their perceived function, while actively interrogating the correlation between labor and play. A recipient of the 2018 Artadia Award, Derrick received his MFA in Photography from the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 2016. His work appeared in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, in collaboration with Paul Mpagi Sepuya and was more recently shown at YNCI V: Detroit Art Week Expo, in a solo exhibition curated by Darryl Terrell.

Mathew Rodriguez is an award-winning queer Latinx journalist, editor and essayist who is currently the associate editor for TheBody, an HIV/AIDS news site. He was previously a staff writer for Mic, INTO and Out Magazine. His work has been featured in POZ, Slate, The Village Voice and Teen Vogue. His essay, "Are You My Papi?" which explores the loss of his father to an AIDS-related illness was also featured in the printed anthology Modern Loss.