The Ross Laycock Initiative for the Exploration of Science, Art, AIDS

A special web gallery in honor of Ross Laycock (1959–1991), biochemist, poet, activist, muse, and partner of Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Since 2016, Visual AIDS has worked with Artist Member Carl George to uplift Ross’s legacy and cultivate new scholarship on his role in the oeuvre of Félix González Torres through the Carl George / Félix González Torres / Ross Laycock Archive. On long term loan to Visual AIDS for nearly a decade, the collection has inspired numerous artistic and academic projects and been featured in exhibitions at the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery and the University of Southern California. We are proud to share that the Getty Research Institute has recently acquired the collection from Carl, and will be making it available to researchers again in the coming months.

On the occasion of the archive’s transition and as part of our end-of-year fundraising campaign, Visual AIDS is launching a special initiative to honor Ross and reflect on the confluence of science, art, and AIDS that he embodied.

This web gallery features artwork from the Visual AIDS Artist Registry that explores the intersection of science, medicine, and art. Since the beginning of the crisis, art has been a way to make visible what has been hidden from view — not only the immense loss and pain that has been shrouded by stigma, but also the microscopic, viral, and immunological realities that are invisible to the naked eye. Artists have helped us visualize, understand, and communicate these invisible registers of our bodies, foregrounding our porousness and interconnectedness. 

Visual AIDS Artist Member Carl George shares more about Ross below:

Ross Laycock, my indomitable gay brother, the prankster, the exuberant athlete and opera buff, the very embodiment of a certain kind of Canadian sprezzatura, is the inspiration for this new and exciting project at Visual AIDS, a vital arts organization both Ross and his life partner Félix González Torres, supported.

I met Ross in 1978 while we were students at McGill University – he a science major, and me, art history; then, in 1980, Ross moved to New York to study menswear design at the Fashion Institute of Technology but soon realized he’d rather buy clothes than design them. I arrived six months later. As different as two young gay men could be, I felt deeply bonded to Ross because he represented a kind of unfettered freedom I had never known or understood, and for him, I was the brother he never had. 

He eventually returned to Canada, became involved with the activist group AIDS Action Now, and, in 1989, organized direct actions at the Fifth International AIDS Conference in Montreal, co-writing a manifesto of demands activists issued to the government of Canada. He then waited tables at one of Toronto’s finest restaurants and studied to become a licensed sommelier, all the while continuing his science studies at the University of Toronto. He died of AIDS related illnesses in 1991, just one credit short of his achieving a master’s degree in biochemistry. 

Ross met Félix González Torres in New York City in 1983. They adored, inspired, and balanced each other in a love affair for the ages. Ross, with his training in science, explained to Félix the many complexities of HIV – deepening their bond and assuaging some of Félix’s fears about what we all knew was coming. In 1992, Félix, by then a celebrated artist, and armed with this knowledge, created a series of drawings based on his blood work results, a source of constant anxiety for all PWAs during those years before antiretrovirals.

My hope is that this project will encourage artists to explore the intersections between art, science, and AIDS, and will highlight the work of artists in the Visual AIDS artist registry who have used the science of HIV to inform their artistic practice. Artists like Valerie Caris Blitz who sewed her printed blood work results into a hospital gown with a scarlet red lining. Or Anthony Viti, who creates stunning abstract paintings using his own bodily fluids, along with traditional art materials. Or Ben Cuevas who knits cushions in the shape of HIV meds. Ross would have loved this.

Throughout the fall, we will invite activists, scientists, doctors, and others in the Visual AIDS community to add their reflections and responses to work from the Visual AIDS archive that engage with medicine. 

With two museum exhibitions and five new archival collections, this has been a year of momentous growth for Visual AIDS. Yet we have also seen devastating funding cuts across the board — HIV research, treatment, services, as well as for the arts, archives, and museums — and an alarming uptick in AIDS denialism. This fall we are raising $75,000 to sustain the work of Visual AIDS in this urgent moment. Please join us by donating to support our work to repair gaps in the cultural record and highlight the insights and contributions of artists living with HIV.