STILL BEGINNING: MCA Chicago 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 MCA Chicago 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 resists 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.

Click below to listen to the post screening discussion with artists Carl George and Derrick Woods-Morrow along with artist Patric McCoy, one of the subjects of Wood-Morrow’s video. The conversation was moderated by Kyle Croft, Programs Manager.

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

Carl George is an artist and activist working in experimental film, painting and collage. His short experimental films have shown in festivals internationally and are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Guggenheim Museum and the New York Public Library. His 1989 film DHPG Mon Amour, documenting the radical advances made by people with AIDS in developing their own health care, is a classic of AIDS activist filmmaking and was incorporated into the Oscar-nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague (2012). His visual art can be seen on the Visual AIDS Artist Registry.

Patric McCoy was an environmental scientist for the USEPA for 30 years. As an activist art collector he co-founded Diasporal Rhythms, an art collectors organization, in 2003. Mr. McCoy was an amateur photo journalist during the 1980s and captured thousands of images of the denizens of Black gay Chicago’s downtown social scene while commuting to work on a bicycle and moving around the Loop’s hot spots after work, inadvertently documented an overlooked community just as the AIDS crisis was unfolding.

Risa Puleo curated fierce pussy: for the record for Visual AIDS' Day With(out) Art in 2013. Her exhibition Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the American Justice System was curated for The Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston and will open at Tufts University Art Gallery in January 2020. Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly, curated for Bemis Center for Contemporary Art during her year as curator-in residence, traveled through the summer of 2019 to MoCA North Miami, Blue Contemporary and Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, The Nerman Art Museum in Kansas City. Other exhibitions have been hosted by the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York City, Franklin Street Works in Stamford, CT, ArtPace, San Antonio, Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, and more. Puleo has Master’s degrees from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Hunter College and is a doctoral candidate in Northwestern University’s art history program. She has written for Art in America, Art Papers, Art 21, Asia Art Pacific, Hyperallergic.com, Modern Painters and other art publications.

Derrick Woods-Morrow’s work is a meditation on deviation and disruption. Currently based in Chicago, his artistic practice deploys a wide variety of media, including photographic transfers, digital video collage, ceramics, and narrative performance. Exploring modes of representation, he salvages, displaces, and removes 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, and was most recently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Photography and Teaching Artist at the University of Illinois Chicago. His work appeared in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, in collaboration with Paul Mpagi Sepuya and his recent works were shown at YNCI V: Detroit Art Week Expo, in a solo exhibition curated by Darryl Terrell.