Hugh Steers & Friends: LA Book Launch & Panel Discussion

For the West Coast Book Launch of Hugh Steers: The Complete Paintings, Visual AIDS hosted a discussion with Hyun Mi Oh and Nicola Goode, close friends of Hugh Steers, moderated by Visual AIDS Programs Director, Alex Fialho, highlighting the range of Steers' work as well personal anecdotes from his rich life. Unique among painters, Steers consciously brought AIDS, intimacy, and the body into the traditional vocabulary of painting.

Hugh Steers: The Complete Paintings featured over 600 full-color images of Steers’ paintings and is the first monograph focused on the career of American figurative painter Hugh Steers (1962-1995), whose life was cut short by AIDS at the age of 32.

PARTICIPANT BIOGRAPHIES

Nicola Goode is an artist/photographer based in Los Angeles. She met Hugh Steers in the first days of their freshman year at Yale and they remained fast friends, creative confidantes and favorite dance partners throughout. After graduating, they shared several apartments in New York into the late '80s.

Hyun Mi Oh is a writer, filmmaker and design entrepreneur. Her friendship with Hugh Steers took root in downtown New York in the late 80's and deepened after she moved to LA, most meaningfully through letters that trace the painter's personal and artistic growth during the final years of his illness.

Alex Fialho, Programs Manager at Visual AIDS, has facilitated projects and conversations around both the history and immediacy of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, utilizing art to maintain HIV/AIDS visibility, consider its legacy, and galvanize contemporary response. His review of the recent exhibition of Hugh Steers' paintings at Alexander Gray Associates appeared in Artforum International Magazine in April 2015.