Weavings: Adam Ash Barbu and Ethan Shoshan for Hunter Reynolds

In this dialogue, curator Adam Ash Barbu and artist Ethan Shoshan explore the relationship between kinship, caregiving, and collective authorship in the time of AIDS. Recorded on July 27, 2023, their conversation foregrounds the life and art of Hunter Reynolds (1959–2022), a longtime Visual AIDS member whose multifaceted practice spans performance, installation art, AIDS activism, and youth mentorship.

From 2007 onwards, Shoshan acted as a friend and studio assistant during a period when Reynolds expanded his artistic approach and navigated barriers related to his changing health. Although Reynolds pursued a diversity of materials, symbolisms, and processes throughout his career, this conversation centers on one particular body of work that remains under-theorized: the artist’s Photo-Weavings—photographs on paper grids assembled with needle and thread—which he first conceptualized in the late 1980s. The Photo-Weavings were the subject of numerous solo exhibitions detailing Reynolds’s interest in healing, self-invention, and archival strategies, including Survival AIDS at Participant Inc (2011), Survival AIDS Medication Reminder at P·P·O·W (2015), and most recently, Love Light at Hales Gallery (2018). Throughout their relationship, Shoshan helped construct the Photo-Weavings, among other works by Reynolds.

As a 2023 Visual AIDS Research Fellow, Barbu’s work focuses on calculating loss and preserving memory through dialogic practices. This conversation serves as the first iteration of their collaborative research involving friends, artists, and archivists who were personally invested in Reynolds’s care.

Ethan Shoshan: When I was in school, I never heard of Hunter. My background is a little different. I always say that I have a bullshit degree. It’s a BS: Bachelor of Science. I studied nuclear astrophysics and researched at Princeton, but I graduated from Rutgers.

AAB: How did you come to art?

ES: In 2003, the United States declared war in Iraq. They wanted me to build drones for the Navy, so I left that world. But I had always been invested in art. It was how I dealt with my depression. That is how I connected with Hunter, through the feeling that art can be emotionally fulfilling, that it can help you process the challenges you face in your life. So, I always had both science and art. I ended up in Manhattan, from New Jersey, staying with a former professor, the artist Geoffrey Hendricks. Like you, I met Hunter first through his work. In 2006, I curated a show [Tragic Bride/Fashion Victim], which also acted as a release party for a collaborative performance piece. We used a community theater space called Collective Unconscious in TriBeCa, where I pulled together works by artists from the Visual AIDS Archive: Hunter Reynolds, John Eric Broaddus, Stephen Varble, Tim Lonergan, and Brian Buczak alongside performing artists. Many of them had relationships with Geoff. I think the names are important because, in a certain way, these artists can no longer speak for themselves. And I think that is why we’re here today—to carry forward this history, this lineage. The show was about transcending and transforming the body as a way of healing. Hunter and Tim, the two Visual AIDS artists who were still living at the time, agreed to be a part of this quiet show that had no funding and where no one got paid. A year later, Hunter ended up in New York, and I saw him by chance. I wrote about that meeting later in the tribute published after his passing.

AAB: Reading and rereading that article, I find myself returning to a specific memory related to Hunter’s Photo-Weavings. You wrote that Hunter loved how you sewed together his images, that he would trust you to create these works when he was no longer around.

AAB: You grew sensitive to the materials. Did he describe the Photo-Weavings to you, conceptually speaking?

ES: I have inklings as to why he decided to create these works, but I never had any conversations with him about that. Nam June Paik said, “The artist’s job is to think about the future.”¹ Artists like Hunter were able to create that distance and forethought to understand what might become. Working in the studio together, he could see the bigger picture. I was there—taking on the role of the helper or assistant. At that time, he struggled with his arm and asked me to write and sign his name for a work he was putting together. I didn’t think anything of it—I just did what he asked. But he made a point to say how important that decision was, adding that I have a choice in the work I make for others—how much of myself I want to give to it. I can recall him saying to me that there would come a point when I would have to make a decision: focus on my own work as an artist and let everything that surrounds me inform that practice, or be swept along by circumstance, take whatever comes my way, and always be seen as an extra hand. He said the things I do will either come back to haunt or excite me. Over fifteen years later, I befriended the art collectors Barry Hoggard and James Wagner, and they showed me some works from their collection, including pieces by Hunter. I started to look closer at the details of one work and noticed my own handwriting. I’m not attributed to any part of that work, but I understand the importance of how it came to be, and how, as an artist, my hand can act as an extension of another’s. And I don’t need to lay claims to it. A cyclical relationship or lineage, perhaps.

AAB: I’m trying to visualize the scope of his personal archive. The Photo-Weavings depict subjects ranging from patterns of light to newspaper clippings.

ES: Images were emotionally charged for him. Snapshot photography played an important role and there was little difference between sex and art in the archive. Still, I know he was looking at these relations from above. And I was looking at the details. With the Photo-Weavings of flower beds, for example, he would tell me to do my own thing, that he trusted me. I knew what he needed and I would focus on how to make that happen. I would think about visual juxtapositions between different flowers and their spatial resonances. In a way, he set up the parameters of the work, which is a conceptual mode of creation. I asked him at one point, flippantly: “How the hell did you come up with the name photo-weaving? I’m not weaving, I’m sewing.” That he chose to describe them as weavings speaks not simply to what the work is but rather what it does. The idea of weaving perhaps connects to a healing process, to the possibility of seeing from a wider lens, beyond the details.

AAB: While the individual photographs in these works are small, the style of patterning images varied according to considerations of scale as well as interior and structural elements. In the case of Mourning Flowers (1993), for example, we see individual images that comprise a fragmented yet cohesive visual field. With works like Greed Kills (2015), a singular collaged image is divided and unified in separate parts.

ES: Money was an issue, and it’s much cheaper to print in that size. Thinking about the ’90s, though, taking snapshots and developing images in supermarkets or pharmacies was standard visual culture. Many of the early pieces like Mourning Flowers consisted of snapshots that were physically rearranged. But his process changed later in life when he was able to collaborate with a technician to split individual images and enlarge and collage them into intricate grids.

AAB: As an art historian, I have loved Hunter’s work from afar, across both temporal and physical distances. And I’m trying to understand what it means to negotiate this sense of distance, here and now, with you. Over the years, I have constructed my own fantasy about the solitary artist at work in a private studio, gathering from the documents of his life.² But I’m beginning to understand the complex processes by which the Photo-Weavings were authored, first in the material sense. You mention the duality between particular and expansive visions. I’m interested in how you see yourself in these works.

ES: I’m still negotiating that question. If I’m going to work on something for someone else, I will try to subsume myself. I will try to erase what sense I have and try to take on their sense of the world. In the end, though, you can’t. Maybe we say we can, but we can’t achieve total neutrality. Hunter was deeply compassionate. At the same time, he could be an intense, overwhelming person. Visiting his studio, there would be a lot happening at once. He would be on the phone, playing CNN and music in the background, while trying to do something on the computer. And I needed to focus on making the thing. So, he would often leave me alone to sew. In a way, it was like an opera. I look back in amazement. He involved others in the work because he could not do certain things. These people possessed the skills to help him survive, to help him move beyond all that he inherited. In a way, these are the weavings: people that come in and out at times to help us grow, to survive as individuals, to care for each other—that imagined community we often name but don’t fully grasp. Besides, we don’t live and operate in a world alone.

ES: The fact that we’re having this conversation just before Hunter’s birthday would have meant something to him. He lived through several hard, life-changing events. He had to overcome a lot to be here. He had strong emotions and formed strong relationships with others—he would instantly connect and vibe with someone. And he fought for recognition. This is part of why he spoke passionately about the things that he cared about. I know we’re focusing on the Photo-Weavings, but Hunter and I also worked together at Arts in the Woods, a summer camp in upstate New York, where he restarted a program providing space for transient queer youth. He was invested in supporting younger generations because he went through those same experiences living on the street. He didn’t have to do that. Let’s say he could have focused on his art career and his legacy. Still, sometimes these worlds overlapped. I remember one night when everyone came together for a bonfire—typical for summer camp but something I had never experienced. For Hunter, the fire was something charged, equally so for the young folks participating. We performed a ritual together, where we each wrote on a piece of paper something that we wanted to let go of, threw it into the fire, and asked the world for something else in return as we watched it burn away. A lot of the brave participants read aloud their traumas before throwing them into the flames. We were all witnesses and became each other’s collective support. And he made work out of it.⁴ He had his own personal demons to work through—we all do. Regarding the Photo-Weavings, I’m not so focused on one aspect of his work. We can look to other things that help illustrate his life. It is hard for me to think about the work from a distanced, theoretical perspective, knowing how these experiences felt as we were living them.

AAB: We are arriving to the work from two different contexts—yours is a durable, material history of caregiving, whereas I’m negotiating the distancing effects of my perspective as an art historian. Continuing this research, I want to step back and consider the different ways in which the Photo-Weavings were installed for the viewer. Hunter often used the hospital bed as a sculptural frame for these works. He would drape the Photo-Weavings above the bed’s rigid surfaces as if a cover offering comfort to an absent body. In my research thus far, I have been thinking about the use of the hospital bed frame in terms of narrative agency, as a gesture of reclamation from the medical establishment and political discourse, to claim a space where one is no longer merely a victim.

ES: Hunter lived through the AIDS crisis, which extends across many decades, and I knew him for two of them. I would go to see him in different stages at different hospitals in New York. In the early days, when he needed care, he would carry a hospital bag of drugs and toiletries because the system did not know how to take care of him. He knew how to read his body—he knew what effects certain drugs would have and requested them from the doctors. I would often run back to his place and pick things up for him. We tend to think of the medical establishment as having everything—that when you arrive to the hospital, you will be taken care of. This is not the case.

AAB: You participated in the development of the 2018 Hales Gallery exhibition Love Light, featuring recent as well as earlier Photo-Weavings, re-fabricated for the exhibition. With this project, he returned to the motif of the hospital bed frame for the first time in several years. The practice of draping the Photo-Weavings offers different points of entry for the viewer. Here, the bed is a place to sleep and to dream, to die and to be born again, perhaps indefinitely so. If the bed is a place of isolation, it is also a place where people gather.

ES: I was micro, he was macro. He would hand me the photos and detail the size of the grid. Sometimes, I would have to map out the structure, providing an image of what the work could look like. I suppose he liked the way I looked at things. For Hunter, images would produce a visceral, emotional response. And in my life, the physicality of things, of objects, ideas, and experiences, are crucial—maybe being visually moved is an impulse I don’t understand quite yet. Certainly, regarding the hospital bed frames, he would have made some aesthetic choices. To add, during the last few years, I remember him sleeping above flat-file cabinets. They offered him a new mechanical bed and he didn’t seem interested. At a certain point in your lack of mobility, altering something elemental can be disorienting. A good example is brushing your teeth with the opposite hand.

AAB: Until recently, I had engaged with the hospital bed frame as a spectator—a wandering visitor within a gallery context. As with the Photo-Weavings themselves, Hunter said very little about the hospital bed frame in his recorded interviews. It comes up indirectly in other narrative contexts—in his recollection of Ray Navarro’s final days, for example. How do you read these interventions, as an artist, collaborator, and caretaker?

ES: I mentioned the powerful hold that images had on him. Presented in this way, the Photo-Weaving becomes a sort of blanket. But they’re photographs—paper, not fabric. So, in the physical sense, you need the hospital bed to call these objects blankets. They are interdependent forces. It is as if Hunter is speaking about comfort, getting well, and trying to survive in this world. And each work is an elegy if we follow the thread that certain beds are for certain people.

AAB: You enter the picture years after Hunter first developed the Photo-Weaving technique. How long did you continue to assist in their construction?

ES: I don’t know much about Ray Navarro. I know that the photographs from his collaboration with Zoe Leonard were shown in Jonathan Katz and Rock Hushka’s Art AIDS America exhibition from 2016—a funny, poignant, and touching reminder of the frailty of our bodies. Hunter performed a procession for that show. Clearly, the legacy of this person who had passed many years ago remains significant. Yesterday, I went to the panel “Art+Positive & Electric Blanket” at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, featuring Lola Flash, Aldo Hernàndez, and Julie Tolentino. Art+Positive was an ACT UP affinity group that Hunter co-founded in the late ’80s to organize actions against censorship in the art world. And I believe Ray was closely connected to that group.

ES: From these origins, the Photo-Weavings expanded, linking together other chapters of his life story.

AAB: Certainly, too, drag is a recurring motif across his oeuvre. But, as he stated several years ago, he had to leave Patina behind.⁷ She wasn’t going to be around forever.

ES: I think he said she was very demanding. But adding to this list of considerations, we should also highlight the Mummification series, which comes up in many different shows.

AAB: Within the context of the Photo-Weavings and the Mummifications, you describe yourself as a helper. But you are also an artist. How has working with Hunter impacted your practice?

ES: I often think about caretaking. Earlier in our conversation, I implied that I prefer to move into the background. But caretaking, whether for ourselves or others, is critical work. In my recent work, I have been exploring issues of mortality—the ways in which we’re living and what we leave behind. I have learned a lot by watching other people. I think we all do. And that is why you’re focused on this research, on Hunter’s work, because there is something in it that is telling you something about your life that you need to unlock. I have tried to understand this through a Zen Buddhist perspective. If you don’t know that your life is going to be over soon, how do you know how important this moment is? We often go on thinking that there isn’t an end. We often can’t think of death as a part of life—we try to separate them. At the same time, existence is pain because we know that we’re going to die. Why can’t we use this knowledge about our temporary nature to simply appreciate the fact that we’re here? The fact that we’re breathing can lead us to actualize, to appreciate what we have in this moment with someone else. For me, these realizations are crucial, because they help propel me forward in thinking, knowing, feeling. They propel me to continue connecting. I feel like I’m still evolving. I don’t know how to describe it, but I want to be living in this experience. Did I take you away from your question?

AAB: Learning about your work—I don’t see this as separate from the research.

AAB: Hunter stated that, following Ray’s passing, he no longer felt the pressure to enact political change through his work. Rather, he would use his practice to explore his emotional relationship to AIDS. Hunter often spoke about AIDS from an expansive point of view—AIDS not merely as a disease, a biological response to HIV infection, but rather AIDS as the social and political context that brings a crisis into being. This is the long history of AIDS, a history shaped by forces of systemic oppression. Hunter’s resistance is rooted in vulnerability, in the wish to heal. That vulnerability is what allows us to step into the work. So, there is honesty at stake.

ES: He is not belaboring the point—there is no pure fantasy.

AAB: And yet his work highlights the processes by which beauty is constructed. Again, we return to the relationship between art and politics. This takes me to another scene, which occurred at the opening of the 1993 group exhibition Stendhal Syndrome: The Cure, held at Andrea Rosen Gallery. The title refers to a condition described by the nineteenth century French author Stendhal, namely the phenomenon of being overcome with emotion at the sight of beauty. At the vernissage, Patina performed in the back office of the gallery. Donning a white velvet jacket, accented by bleach-blond hair, she posed for photographs with wanderers and passersby, some of whom were reluctant to participate. Following each shoot, she would hand out a palm-sized card stating that her guest had been cured of Stendhal Syndrome. The notion of Patina curing Stendhal Syndrome is complex. From this exchange, seemingly nothing is transformed. Her cure appears artificial. It offers nothing more than the promise of transformation coupled with the weight of the inherited social and political context. And hers is a lived context that upends beauty, that prevents us from falling into that Stendhal daze. The card is a wink and a nod that returns us to a troubled origin where beauty is an impossibility, never neutral or disinterested. AIDS is a foundational ground of meaning that cannot be erased from the relational logic of work.

About the Author

Adam Ash Barbu is a writer, curator, and educator based in Ottawa, Canada. They hold M.A. in Art History from the University of Toronto and currently work as a curatorial research resident at the University of Ottawa. A recipient of the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators, Barbu has produced numerous group exhibitions foregrounding AIDS cultural histories, including The Queer Feeling of Tomorrow (2015), Empty History (2019) and Words Unsaid (2023). Their recent writings have appeared in publications such as OnCurating, Peripheral Review, and Esse art + opinions. Barbu lectures on queer theory and trans studies locally, nationally, and internationally.

Writing from the 2023 Research Fellowship is edited by Sophia Larigakis.