Upcoming Event
VAVA VOOM 2024: Honoring Lola Flash, Philip Yenawine, and Brian Butterick (1956-2019)
City Winery NYC
Join Visual AIDS in honoring the work of Lola Flash, Philip Yenawine, and Brian Butterick (1956-2019) at the 2024 Visual AIDS Vanguard Awards. Since 2006, VAVA has honored members of our community whose impact has benefited artists living with HIV and those lost to AIDS. VAVA sustains the vital 36-year legacy of Visual AIDS, and we are honored to highlight the tremendous careers of these crucial community members with this moment of celebration.
We celebrate Lola, Philip, and Brian with a joyous evening at City Winery on June 5, 2024. Join us for a seated dinner, full bar, and a special performance series to honor the legacy of Brian Butterick.
More information and tickets here!
Can't make it? Consider a donation at the ticket price to sustain the mission and legacy of Visual AIDS.
Interested in joining our Benefit Committee or sponsorship at a larger amount to celebrate these incredible honorees? Email sescarciga@visualaids.org
LOLA FLASH
A New Jersey native who is a longtime figure in New York’s downtown scene, Lola Flash is an activist documenting themes around race, age, and gender. Flash was an active member of ACT UP during the time of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, and was notably featured in the 1989 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster. Their art and activism are profoundly connected, fueling a life-long commitment to visibility and preserving the legacy of LGBTQIA+ and communities of color worldwide.
Flash has been working as a practicing artist and teacher in the US and UK with numerous international exhibitions and commissions over the past several decades, and has work included in important public collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, MoMA, the Whitney and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Flash’s work welcomes audiences who are willing to not only look but see.
PHILIP YENAWINE
Philip Yenawine has been engaged in museum education for forty years, ten of those as director of education at MOMA. He writes about art often focused on connecting people to it, especially children. He co-created Art Matters Foundation with Laura Donnelley, Visual Thinking Strategies with Abigail Housen, and was an early member of Visual AIDS. He coordinated the first Day Without Art and was meeting chair for the first several years of its operation. He was instrumental in underwriting salaries for VisualAIDS’ first two employees, Patrick O’Connell and Alexander Gray. We continues to write about art and to support the implementation of Visual Thinking Strategies. He lives in Baltimore with his husband Leo Buser.
BRIAN BUTTERICK (1956-2019)
New York born Brian Butterick (AKA Hattie Hathaway) was a performer, actor, writer, producer and personality working in Downtown art, theatre, film and nightlife for over forty years.
He sat on the Executive Board of the HOWL! Festival, the annual celebration of art, music, dance, theatre and spoken word centered around New York’s East Village/Lower East Side. He appeared in Steven Schainberg’s Fur, starring Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey Jr. and made his Broadway debut in The Roundabout Theatre’s production The Threepenny Opera, newly translated by Wallace Shawn, directed by Scott Elliot and starring Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper.
In the 1990’s, Butterick co-produced the famed New York Meat Market Tuesday-night-only boite, Jackie 60, and [co-produced] Night Of a Thousand Stevies. From 1991-95, he produced, directed and acted in the underground theatrical ensemble, Blacklips Performance Cult.
In the 1980’s, Butterick was creative director of the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge, a venue that melded the performing arts with music and drag. From 1985-89, he co-founded and produced Wigstock, Tompkins Square Park’s outdoor festival of drag performance, which was later immortalized in the Goldwyn film of the same name. During this time, Butterick also appeared in numerous independent films, most notably Charles Atlas’ Son Of Sam & Delilah, for PBS, as well as composing and performing with the post-punk band, 3 Teens Kill 4.
brianbutterick.org