What You Don't Know Could Fill A Museum: AIDS, Art & the Institution

How is HIV/AIDS being represented in public? How could it be? How "should" it be? The second part of Visual AIDS' ongoing public conversation about Art, AIDS and representation.

These questions were contemplated at an event convened by Visual AIDS for What You Don't Know Could Fill A Museum: Activism, AIDS, Art and the Institution, a lively discussion as part of the Brooklyn Museum's First Saturday events. Discussed were ways in which HIV/AIDS is represented in films, books, and the academy, as well as in museums and galleries. Additionally, the conversation covered how HIV/AIDS could and "should" be represented and has been represented in the past.

Transcripts of the event are downloadable below, with images, and without.

Panelists include:

Tara Burk is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her dissertation examines queer and feminist public art collectives active in New York City from the late 1980s through the early 1990s. In 2004 Burk graduated summa cum laude from Stony Brook University with a B.A. degree in Art History and Women’s Studies. She has a forthcoming essay in the refereed journal WSQ on the 1977 “Lesbian Art and Artists” issue of the journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics.

Jean Carlomusto is a filmmaker. Her documentaries have been exhibited internationally in festivals, museums and on television. She produced, directed and edited, SEX IN AN EPIDEMIC, which premiered on Showtime Networks. She created OFFERINGS, an interactive video altar that was featured in art exhibitions such as: Make Art/Stop AIDS, Fowler Museum, UCLA and NOT ALONE, Durbin Art Gallery, Durbin, South Africa, and subsequently touring throughout South Africa. She is a professor of Media Arts and Director of the Television Center at LIU Post. She is currently directing a documentary about Larry Kramer for HBO.

Vincent Cianni is a documentary photographer. His work explores community and memory, the human condition, and the use of image and text. His photographs have been exhibited at Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Nasher Museum, Photographers’ Gallery, London; the 7th International Photography Festival in Mannheim; and the George Eastman House. A major survey of his work was exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York in 2006.

Hugh Ryan is a writer and traveler currently based in New York City. His food and travel writing have appeared in numerous venues. He has ghostwritten eight young adult novels. As a copywriter, he has produced web copy, video scripts, and social media tie-ins for a variety of major brand name companies. In 2013 he wrote How to Whitewash a Plague, a New York Times Op-ed about the New-York Historical Society's AIDS in New York: The First Five Years.

Moderator:

Brittany Duck, activist, visual artist and lover of all things creative. She is currently completing a Master's degree at The New School, where she serves as a member of the Queer Collective, a student advocacy group. Duck also works as a volunteer organizer with Queers for Economic Justice and the Audre Lorde Project.

This conversation builds on (re)Presenting AIDS: Culture and Accountability, a public forum Visual AIDS hosted in August 2013 with the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY. It brought together nine individuals working at the intersection of art, AIDS and representation.