Into the Registry: An Artist Member and Community Space (August 2022)

In the second half of the program, the curator of our August web gallery elaborated on the inspiration informing their selection of artworks from our Artist+ Registry, a database of work by artists living with HIV, and those who are no longer with us. The curator was joined by several other artists, creatives, and thinkers to discuss relevant themes in the web gallery.

For this iteration of the series, curator Jennell Strong lead a conversation connected to her web gallery, Speculative Non-Fiction. She was joined by collage artist and Visual AIDS artist member Joe De Hoyos and activist Richard Jeffreys, Basic Science, Vaccines, and Cure Project Director at Treatment Action Group (TAG). Together they shared a conversation about the ongoing fight for an HIV/AIDS cure from both a scientific and cultural angle. They discussed the status of recent cure trials and studies, as continuously documented by Jeffreys, as well as the social impact that a cure could have for people living with HIV.

Bios:

Jennell Strong is a native New Yorker most interested in the relationship between sexuality and health, specifically how the act, the culture and the concept of sex impact our overall health beyond the typical discourse of STI’s and reproduction.

Joe De Hoyos has been a collage artist since 1987 when he took a special studies course at the University of Houston and fell in love with the process. He was drawn to working in a non-classical art medium finding influences in Dada, Surrealism, and Pop Art. Much like the Dadaists did he re-appropriates (found) imagery to create meaning out of unexpected juxtapositions. In his hands penises become line drawings, eyes become kites, and colorful dots symbolize viruses. Subjects he often touches upon include politics, sex, AIDS, fame, and consumerism.

Richard Jeffreys, Basic Science, Vaccines and Cure Project Director at Treatment Action Group (TAG), is particularly focused on HIV cure research education and advocacy. Among the project’s most widely used and cited resources is the regularly updated listing of HIV cure-related clinical trials and studies on the TAG website, which Richard created in 2014 as a spin-off from their annual Pipeline Reports.

Richard began working in the HIV field in 1994 at the AIDS Treatment Data Network in NYC, helped establish the Health GAP Coalition in 1999, and has written for a wide range of publications. He originally moved from London to New York in the early 90s to go dancing and make house music, and still harbors an affection for the analog drum machines and synthesizers of the 1980s.

Glammy Rose Spencer is a 36 year old artist, educator and proud HIV positive transgender woman. She is an art and health teacher and speaks at various high schools in the Bay Area about HIV history, stigma, and HIV justice today. Her art includes murals, printmaking and bedazzling everything around her.

"I create art to heal myself, turn my demons into superpowers, and pay respects to our poz elders and ancestors, conveying how much support they give to new generations of people fighting to survive."

Lucas Josué Nuñez Saavedra is a non-binary visual artist and independent researcher. They are a part of the Circle of Students Living with HIV as Head of graphics and communications. They also work as a designer at J+LAC.

Lucas graduated from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and is an artist and researcher of the affective dimensions in public life with a focus on the processes of mourning, the socialization of pain, and the incidence of public discourse on HIV/AIDS.