Last Address Tribute: Los Angeles

Visual AIDS, ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles are thrilled to present Last Address Tribute: Los Angeles. The event honors sites, people, and histories of Downtown and East LA critical to understanding artistic, community-based narratives of the AIDS epidemic, with a focus on queer Chicanx artists and activists. We are honored to tribute Laura Aguilar, Gil Cuadros, Ray Navarro, and Yolanda Retter.

A bus will transport attendees across the three locations of the Last Address Tribute: Los Angeles with tributes expressed by family, friends, scholars, curators, and archivists who have cared for the memories of these queer Los Angelenos. The event runs from 1-4pm and snacks will be provided. ONE Archives will open at 12 and close at 5 so you can engage with relevant items from the collection before and after the tour. You must check in by 12:45 to secure your seat on the bus. Tickets are limited. RSVPs will open on Dec. 3.

★ The event will begin at ONE Archives at the USC Libraries (909 W Adams Blvd) at 1 pm with a screening of Ira Sachs’s short film Last Address (2010) and opening remarks by tribute organizers, Alex Fialho and Alexandra Juhasz. There will also be time to view Juhasz’s installation Holding Patterns that grounds the journey in research about grief, care, loss, and activism.

At ONE Archives, [ ] will tribute Dr. Yolanda Retter (1947–2007)—a librarian and archivist at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Library and an activist dedicated to providing a voice to lesbian and AIDS-related issues and preserving their history. Retter was a champion for social justice who organized numerous repositories on lesbian history around the city.

★ Pablo Alvarez will tribute Gil Cuadros (1962-1996) at the corner of Whittier Blvd & South Atlantic Blvd, an intersection in East Los Angeles highlighted by Cuadros in his poem “There Are Places You Don't Walk at Night, Alone.” Cuadros was a groundbreaking writer whose work explored the intersections of sexuality, race, and spirituality. The bus will then drive through City Terrace where Cuadros once lived and wrote about in his short story My Aztlan: White Place. Cuadros’s poems and short stories can be found in his collections City of God (1994) and My Body is Paper (2024), both published by City Lights Books.

★ Patricia Navarro will tribute her son Ray Navarro (1964–1990) at MOCA LA (250 S Grand Ave), where he worked for many years. Patricia donated her son’s artwork, Equipped, to MOCA’s permanent collection after his death. Ray Navarro was an artist, filmmaker, activist, and a member of DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activists), a video-documenting affinity group of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP).

★ The event will conclude back at ONE Archives, as Pablo Alvarez tributes Laura Aguilar (1959–2018) and where her portrait of Gil Cuadros is on view in the exhibition The Space We Take: Portraits from the Archive. Aguilar was a photographer whose work was characterized by portraits of diverse communities in the Los Angeles area, self-portraits, and later, nude self-portraits in nature. Patricia Navarro will also speak to materials from Ray Navarro that she donated to ONE Archives after cleaning out his apartment in New York.

About the Last Address Tribute 

Visual AIDS’s Last Address Tribute Walk revisits the former home addresses of artists lost to AIDS, as well as locations shaped by HIV and AIDS activism and queer cultural history. Inspired by Ira Sachs’s film Last Address (2010) and conceived and led by Alex Fialho beginning in 2013, past iterations of the Last Address Tribute Walk featured doorstep tributes in the New York City neighborhoods of the East Village (2014), Chelsea (2015), the Lower East Side (2016), the West Village (2017), the Meatpacking District (2018), Times Square (2019), and Harlem (2022). This is the ninth Last Address Tribute event and the first in Los Angeles.

Biographies

Pablo Alvarez  is a first-generation Chicanx from Pico Rivera, California. He holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies. His research is grounded in collaborations that unearth the legacies of Latinx and Chicanx AIDS queer ancestry. He is a co-editor of My Body is Paper: Stories and Poems by Gil Cuadros and is an assistant professor in Gender and Sexuality Studies at California State University, Fullerton. He is a participant of Writers@Work, Los Angeles. His friendship with Laura Aguilar led to a commitment to illuminating her AIDS work and her relationship with Gil Cuadros. Aguilar and Cuadros offer a legacy of Chicanx AIDS consciousness channeled through creative conviction, care, and intimate friendship. Their artistic careers emerged during uncertain times of great illness and loss, fueling a tumultuous and loving Chicanx queer friendship recognizing in each other a sense of belonging.

Patricia Navarro is the mother of ACT UP NY member Ray Navarro, who died of AIDS complications in November 1990. During the eight months that she was in New York while her son was ill, she joined ACT UP NY and the People With AIDS Coalition Mother’s Support Group. After returning to her home in Simi Valley, CA, she became an advocate for prevention education and other services in the HIV/AIDS community.  For more information about Patricia, please go to: www.actuporalhistory.com

Alex Fialho is a PhD candidate in Yale University’s Combined PhD program in the History of Art and Black Studies. As an art historian and curator, Fialho focuses on modern and contemporary art, Black queer and feminist thought, and AIDS cultural studies. Based in Los Angeles, Fialho was a 2024–2025 Predoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute and is the 2025–2026 Luce/ACLS Ellen Holtzman Dissertation Fellow in American Art. Fialho worked as Programs Director of Visual AIDS from 2014–2019 and as an Oral Historian for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art’s Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project.

Alexandra Juhasz is Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She writes about and makes feminist, queer, fake, and AIDS documentary. Her current work attends to pandemic media, fake news poetry, online feminist pedagogy, and other more radical uses of digital media and their archives. Her installation, HOLDING PATTERNS, is currently on display at ONE Archives and the Center’s Pat Parker/Vito Russo Library. See pleaseholdvideo.com.

Last Address Tribute: Los Angeles is organized by Alex Fialho and Alexandra Juhasz; Blake Paskal, Programs Director, Visual AIDS; Alexis Bard Johnson, Curator, and Quetzal Arevalo, Getty Marrow Emerging Professional Curatorial Assistant, ONE Archives at USC Libraries; and Justen Leroy, Director of Public Programs and Community Outreach, MOCA LA.