Community Knowledge Practice: A Portfolio

Guest editor Theodore Kerr presents a portfolio documenting three recent examples of community knowledge practice—conversations that reshape historical narratives by leveling the playing field between scholars, community members, and knowledge bearers.

Table of Contents

Public Garden, 16 Commerce Street: Anthony Pellino and his 1983 plan for an AIDS Memorial

Don’t Mourn Consecrate: Talking about AIDS and Juan González’s Historic Public Art (forthcoming)

Pandemic Publications: On AIDS, COVID, and Books by Matteo Pfahler (forthcoming)

Introduction: Updating AIDS Cultural History One Conversation at a Time

Community knowledge practice is a phrase I use to describe a process of sharing while learning, in which researchers, community members, and other participants come together to listen, present, and consider through presentations and conversation. Community knowledge practice is vital and has been an important part of my AIDS culture work as an organizer, writer, and educator for the past 20 years. It is a strategy I know from traditions such as consciousness raising groups, community-led research projects, activism, the fine art of gossip, some aspects of memorialization, oral history and more.

To get a sense of what I mean, focus on the strings in Cliff Hengst’s painting EVERYONE. For some people, the strings can be seen as coming out or from the letters, their length and destination unknown. To me, the strings are being pulled and anchored by an off canvas source, keeping each letter in place in service of the larger goal: producing and maintaining the word EVERYONE. In my reading, the letters, the strings and the word they make together are community and knowledge. The process by which it all happens—the overlapping strings; the touching of some letters, the space between others; the unseeable forces—is the practice.

The contents of this portfolio are rooted in examples of community knowledge practice that I helped organize in late 2023. Two entries offer primary documents that meaningfully contribute histories of AIDS memorials and public art; the third analyzes an event that brought together books, AIDS, and COVID-19.

The portfolio opens with an interview I conducted in December 2023 with designer Anthony Pellino about Public Garden, 16 Commerce Street, a proposed AIDS memorial he drafted in 1983 while a student at the Parsons School of Design. Pellino’s plans are, as far as I can tell, the earliest recorded plan for an AIDS memorial. They were made two years before the AIDS Memorial Garden opened in Houston, and five years before the inaugural viewing of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt in D.C. (and two years before Cleve Jones conceived of the quilt). The interview is in two parts, and begins with Pellino providing context to the conditions under which his idea bloomed. Readers get a sense of the West Village in the early 1980s, a place of wonder for many, yet mourning and foreboding for others based on their awareness of and connection to the emerging crisis of HIV. In Pellino’s narration, rich details of West Village life emerge, including the importance of small business and the labyrinthine quality of the West Village streets. In the second part of the interview, Pellino answers questions, clarifying his design, and joins me in thinking about his design in the context of his life and AIDS history.

The second offering in this portfolio is a multi-voice transcript from an October 2023 event regarding Don’t Mourn Consecrate, an 1987 AIDS related public artwork by Juan González (1942–1993). It appeared in the window of the Grey Art Gallery two months before the legendary debut of ACT UP’s Let The Record Show… at the New Museum, often considered the first public artwork about AIDS. The Don’t Mourn event was organized by Leah Sweet from NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, Nicholas Martin from NYU Special Collections, and myself, with meaningful contributions from David Brinker at the Museum of Religious Art at Saint Louis University. The event was organized as a Long Table, a feminist format that begins with table populated by invited speakers and empty chairs. After the invited speakers present, the audience, created in a circle around the table, are invited to step up, sit in an empty chair and engage in dialogue, either asking a question based on what was said, or adding to the conversation through their own thoughts. The long table format facilitates community knowledge practice as it literally makes room at the “table” for a diversity of perspectives, while also holding space for expertise as a form of “table-setting”.

The Don’t Mourn event began with a recorded presentation from Brinker, followed by prepared comments from myself and Sweet. Presentations from invited guests, sitting at the table, came after: religious scholar Samuel Ernest, artist Carlos Motta and curator Melanie Kress. Each provided a framework through which to consider Don’t Mourn based on their unique perspectives. The evening concluded with a session where various members of the gathered audience joined the table at various times, and spoke about the work, asking questions, drawing art historic connections, and relating themes of Don’t Mourn to their own lives. In the audience were artists, social workers, students, and members of González’s family.

With both the Public Gardens and Don’t Mourn conversations, the resulting transcripts provide scholars, artists and others alike a chance to learn, investigate, and consider further what has been shared: to keep the work of community knowledge practice going. My guess is that as people learn about Public Gardens, we will see other early AIDS memorial plans emerge as well. Similarly, as knowledge around Don’t Mourn grows, the ways in which we understand and historicize AIDS art will likely evolve in tactic and scope. I think specifically about social worker Fernando Mariscal who made comments, linking González’s work to the shrines the people living with HIV in the hospice where he once worked would make; and Visual AIDS’ own Kyle Croft considering the ways González’s Don’t Mourn opens up avenues to consider AIDS related art work within the larger story of art history, rather than just limited to postmodernism considerations.

The portfolio ends with an article written by scholar Matteo Pfahler about Pandemics + Books, an online gathering, also in October 2023, of over 20 authors of AIDS-related books published in the first three years of the COVID 19 pandemic. I worked with my friend and frequent collaborator, scholar and videomaker Alexandra Juhasz, on the event for the inaugural year of Circa, a queer history festival created by the One Institute. Pfahler’s text connects the dots between the content shared in the books, the event itself, and his own investments around the related yet different epidemics of COVID and HIV. Included in the piece is a link to video documentation of the event, and a list of over 70 AIDS-related books published between 2020 and 2023. I hope that, along with Pfahler’s writing, these resources will also be of service to people in the present and the future.

Community knowledge practice refreshes, pushes, contradicts, updates what people know about the past until what counts as history, or even common knowledge, is updated, challenged, and reconsidered, one conversation at a time. My goal in putting this portfolio together is not only to highlight the work of Pellino, González, and the over 20 authors of AIDS-related books who participated in the event—it is also to keep conversation about AIDS culture, past, present, and future ever relevant, ever updating, and ever inclusive. Doing this work, I often get the sense that people think they understand the ongoing epidemic, but will then learn one new fact or detail, and all of a sudden they will need to reevaluate everything they thought they knew about AIDS. Such evaluations are healthy, especially when conducted by communities of impacted and diverse voices.

Theodore (ted) Kerr is an educator, writer, and organizer. He is the co-author of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2022, with Alexandra Juhasz). He curated the 2021 exhibition AIDS, Posters and Stories of Public Health: A People's Pandemic for the National Libraries of Medicine. He was one of 4 oral historians who worked on Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project for the Smithsonian, Archives for American Art in 2017 / 2018. In 2019, he edited "What You Don’t Know about AIDS Could Fill A Museum," an issue of the On Curating journal, and in 2014, he edited "Time Is Not A Line," a journal issue for Carlos Motta's project, We Who Feel Differently. Kerr is a founding member of What Would an HIV Doula Do?