POSTPONED TO MAY 2021: VAVA VOOM honoring Dr. Daniel S. Berger, Catherine Gund, Frederick Weston

VAVA VOOM honoring Dr. Daniel S. Berger, Catherine Gund, and Frederick Weston has been postponed to May 2021. Exact date TBD - we will keep you posted!

Questions? Prefer to mail or phone in your purchase or donation? Contact Esther McGowan at [email protected].

HONORING:
Dr. Daniel S. Berger, presented by Jonathan D. Katz
Catherine Gund, presented by Ivy Arce
Frederick Weston, presented by Nayland Blake

Hosted by Rebecca Havemeyer
Performances by Christeene and special guest Justin Vivian Bond
Portraits of guests by Richard Haines
VAVA VOOM gift shop featuring limited edition artist t-shirts, bags, artwork and more...

HONOREE BIOS

DR. DANIEL S. BERGER
Dr. Daniel S. Berger is a leading HIV specialist in the U.S. He is Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Illinois and medical director and founder of Northstar Medical Center, the largest private HIV-treatment and research center in Greater Chicago. Dr. Berger is well known internationally, having conducted more than 200 HIV-related clinical research trials and published extensively in medical journals including the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. In 1992, he conducted the world’s first study of combination therapy for HIV infection, presenting his findings at World AIDS in Amsterdam later that year. This research became a stepping-stone to the AIDS drug cocktail that followed 3 years later. During the years 2005-2010, antiretroviral therapy for HIV disease experienced a revolution in therapeutics. Berger was heavily involved as principal investigator of these agents and co-authored several resultant iconic publications of these studies. Among his book publications, he contributed to "HIV – The First Year, An Essential Guide for the Newly Diagnosed" (Marlow & Company) and "Nutritional Aspects of HIV Disease" (Oxford Univ Press). Dr. Berger lectures nationally to physicians, educating them on the latest HIV-research studies. Dr. Berger has served on numerous boards and committees including the Medical Issues Committee for the Illinois AIDS Drug Assistance Program and the AIDS Foundation of Chicago. In 2006, Berger was honored by Test Positive Aware Network with the Charles E Clifton Leadership Award; in 2016 the Chicago Reader named Dr. Berger as #1 Practitioner of the year.

Additionally, Dr. Daniel Berger is an active patron of the arts. In 2010, he founded Iceberg Projects, an alternative exhibition space in Chicago. In 2015, Dr. Berger acquired the archives of Art+Positive, an important affinity group of ACT UP New York and co-curated the first exhibition of the archives. To disseminate the ephemera within the archive he co- published Militant Eroticism: The Art+Positive Archives (Sternberg Press, Berlin). Additionally, Dr. Berger curated Chicago’s first David Wojnarowicz solo show and subsequently published David Wojnarowicz: Flesh of My Flesh (SPD, Berkeley, CA). To support young artists, Dr. Berger founded a Scholarship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's MFA program: The Daniel Berger Barbara DeGenevieve Scholorship in Photography. Each year the scholarship is awarded to a student whose work explores the boundaries of identity, an impassioned theme of the late Barbara DeGenevieve. Beginning in 2016, Dr. Berger was listed by Newcity’s The Art 50 as one of the top 50 most influential individuals in Chicago's Art Community and recently was added to Newcity’s Art Hall of Fame. He is a member of the Board of Governors for the Art Institute of Chicago, member of Collections and Acquisitions Committee of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, member of the Board of Advisors of the Block Museum of Northwestern University and co-President of the Board of Trustees of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in NY. When not on a board or practicing medicine, he likes to give kisses to a little doggie Nero and his life partner Scott.

CATHERINE GUND
Founder of Aubin Pictures, Catherine Gund is an Emmy-nominated producer, director, writer, and activist. Her media work focuses on strategic and sustainable social transformation, arts and culture, HIV/AIDS and reproductive health, and the environment. Gund’s most recent projects include: Aggie, a story told through art about art, justice and the filmmaker's mother Agnes Gund; Dispatches from Cleveland, a five-chapter documentary that looks at the police murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice; and Chavela, a documentary about the life of the iconic Latin-American gender-bending diva, Chavela Vargas. Her past films include America, Born to Fly, What’s On Your Plate?, A Touch of Greatness, Motherland Afghanistan, Making Grace, On Hostile Ground and Hallelujah! Ron Athey, which have screened around the world in festivals, theaters, museums, and schools; on PBS, the Discovery Channel, Sundance Channel, Netflix, and Amazon.

FREDERICK WESTON
Frederick Weston was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1946, and raised in Detroit, Michigan, where he participated in the club scene before moving to New York City in the mid-1970s. He studied menswear design and marketing at the Fashion Institute of Technology. He is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist who works in varied media: collage, drawing, sculpture, photography, performance, and creative writing. Over the course of his time in New York, he has developed a vast, encyclopedic archive of images and ephemera related to fashion, the body, advertising, AIDS, race, and queer subjects. He currently lives and works in his apartment in New York City.

Weston is represented by Gordon Robichaux, NY, where he presented his first New York solo exhibition in 2019. In 2020, he received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Roy Lichtenstein Award and presented a site-specific installation at the gallery in the Ace Hotel in New York. A forthcoming book with an interview between Weston and Samuel R. Delany will be published by Visual Aids in fall 2020. He has exhibited his work widely in group exhibitions: Souls Grown Diaspora, apexart (curated by Sam Gordon); Heaven and Hell, Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles; Tag: Proposals on Queer Play and the Ways Forward, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, PA (curated by Nayland Blake); This Must Be the Place, 55 Walker, NY (curated by O.O. & M.M. and Miles Huston); Inside, Out Here, La MaMa Galleria, NY (curated by Eric Booker); A Page from My Intimate Journal (Part I) —, Gordon Robichaux, NY; Art AIDS America, The Bronx Museum of the Arts; Found, Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, NY (curated by Avram Finkelstein); CUT HERE (with Matt Keegan and Siobhan Liddell), Gordon Robichaux, NY; Queer Artist Fellowship: Alternate Routes, Leslie Lohman Project Space, NY (curated by Osman Can Yerebakan); and Persons of Interest, Bureau of General Services, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center, NY (curated by Sam Gordon). He has participated in numerous panels and presented his creative writing and poetry for Visual Aids; Queer Artists of Color in New York during the AIDS Epidemic, College Art Association of America, 2019 Annual Conference, NY; Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: Smithsonian Archives of American Art Symposium, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Fag, Stag, or Drag? John Neff and Frederick Weston in Conversation, Artists Space, NY; Three Readings: Wayne Koestenbaum, Darinka Novitovic, and Frederick Weston, Gordon Robichaux, NY. In 2017, an oral history with Weston, conducted by Ted Kerr, was published by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art for Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project. Weston’s work has been lauded by Holland Cotter in The New York Times on two occasions, by Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine, and in numerous publications including Arforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula magazine.