Makeshift Historiographies: Case Studies in HIV/AIDS Cultural Archives

Join Visual AIDS at the College Art Association for a panel presenting case studies in AIDS-related art histories from four scholars.

Makeshift Historiographies: Case Studies in HIV/AIDS Cultural Archives
Friday, February 16, 2024
4:30–6:00PM CST

For hundreds of artists who died of AIDS-related causes, only scant traces of their work—if any at all—exist in institutional archival repositories. Therefore, art-historical work revolving around the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic has often called for inventive archival methods that blend traditional forms of research with community work and emotional labor. Over the last fifteen years, scholars and activists have contended with the gaps and erasures in such archives as well as the geographic, racial, and gender biases that have characterized many historical projects. In so doing, many have necessarily drawn on and even created community-based repositories, personal collections, and oral history initiatives. The precarity and preciousness of such archives are central topics in recent scholarship, including Marika Cifor’s, Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (2022), Jarrett Earnest’s Devotion: Today’s Future Becomes Tomorrow’s Archive (2022), and Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr’s We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (2022).

Indebted to these texts, our panel calls for papers focused on case studies elaborating on archival methods related to art histories of HIV/AIDS. Seeking to acknowledge the efforts of scholars, curators, and archivists who have worked to complicate this emergent canon and reimagine the terrain of AIDS cultural production, we welcome papers that reintroduce artists or their legacies into public and scholarly discourse, detailing the journey from discovery, inquiry, analysis, and sharing. We are especially interested in papers offering methodological reflections that might be of use to individuals engaged in parallel projects.

Presentations

George Febres: Archives, Affectivity and Queer Culture
Eduardo Carrera, University of Pennsylvania

Archiving the Intangible: Víctor Fernández Fragoso’s Posthumous Legacy
Herbert Duran

The Exploded View: Researching and Curating the Work and Life of Hamad Butt
Dominic Johnson

The Art History of the Storage Unit: Or, Lola Flash's "Cross-Colour" Photography Out From Under The Bed
Alex Fialho, Yale University

Chairs: Kyle Croft, Visual AIDS and Jackson Davidow, Harvard Art Museums

Note: Conference registration is required to attend. Unfortunately, CAA no longer offers free or pay-what-you-wish admission to their conference.