ArtAIDSAmericaChicago.org#ArtAIDSChi

UPCOMING IN-GALLERY STAGE SERIES

FINAL WEEKS!ThroughApril 2, 2017Alphawood Gallery2401 North Halsted StreetChicago

Free and open to public

Wednesday-Thursday | 11 am - 8 pmFriday-Saturday-Sunday | 11 am - 6 pm

About Face Theatre Presents AIDS ON STAGE Mondays in March | 7 pm Since 2013, AFT’s OUT FRONT Series has presented workshops and readings of new and developmental works exploring LGBTQIA themes. For our 21st season, in conjunction

with the groundbreaking exhibition Art AIDS America at Alphawood Gallery, About Face will

present AIDS ON STAGE, a series of readings from HIV/AIDS focused plays to provide a retrospective

look at how theatre artists have addressed the devastating health crisis throughout the decades. The readings will take place at Alphawood Gallery. Admission is free, however reservations are recommend.

March 13 | Jeffrey | by Paul RudnickMarch 20 | In the Continuum | by Danai Gurira and Nikkole SalterMarch 27 | And All the Dead Lie Down | by Harrison David Rivers

Art AIDS America was organized by Tacoma Art Museum in partnership with The Bronx Museum of the Arts.In Chicago, this exhibition is made possible by the Alphawood Foundation, a Chicago-based, grant-making private foundation working for an equitable, just and humane society.

Art AIDS America

FRIDAY, MARCH 10 | 7 pm - 8 pmSATURDAY, MARCH 11 | 9:30 am - 5 pm

VIRALREPRESENTATION:ON AIDS AND ARTA Conference on artistic responses to AIDS in America

The Alphawood Foundation, the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts,and Department of Art History at the University of Chicago present:

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Conference Schedule

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FRIDAY, MARCH 10 7:00 pm - 8:15 pmAlphawood Gallery 2401 North Halsted Street | Chicago

7:00 pm - 8:15 pmKeynote: Amelia Jones “Queer Communion: Ron Athey’s Coalitional Performance of Extremity and Generosity”

SATURDAY, MARCH 11 9:30 am - 5:00 pmUniversity of Chicago 915 East 60th Street | Chicago

9:30 amCoffee and continental breakfast

10:00 amConference Welcome: Matthew Jesse Jackson

10:05 amConference Introduction Jonathan Katz “How AIDS Changed American Art”

11:00 amDavid Getsy “On Being a Public Artist with AIDS in 80s America: Scott Burton and Conformational Masking”

11:40 amJoshua Chambers-Letson “Tseng Kwong Chi and the Party’s End”

12:20 pmLunch

1:00 pmPanel: Patric McCoy, Oli Rodriguez, Kate Pollasch, and Avram Finkelstein

2:00 pmDerek Conrad Murray “Cruising towards a Queer of Color Critique”

2:40 pmTheodore Triandos “’Mutually Incompatible Readings: AIDS, Allegory, and the Limits of Postmodernist Art Criticism”

3:20 pmJih-Fei Cheng “Development is a Façade: Dean Sameshima’s In Between (Days Without You) and the Queer Ecologies of Downtown Los Angeles”

4:00 pmPanel with conference participants and open dialogue, moderated by Matthew Jesse Jackson

4:45 pmClosing remarks

5:00 pmConference end

Viral Representation: On AIDS and Art, in conjunction with Art AIDS America at the Alphawood Gallery, brings together scholars, artists, collectors, and curators to address how artists have responded to, and reflected on, AIDS in America.

Artistic responses to AIDS encompass an enormous range of modes of political address, ranging from the aggressively activist to the most subtle forms of innuendo. On one side, these artistic choices were informed by a rising Christian Right in government that successfully instrumentalized homophobic, AIDS-phobic discourse to legislate discrimination. On the other side, in an art world under the sway of postmodernist ideals that denigrated the expressive possibilities of any form of authorship, the politics of AIDS art was equally subject to erasure. Pressed from two sides, AIDS artists had an uncomfortable choice between an activism that was not taken seriously as sophisticated art, and a serious art that had to camouflage its activist intent.

In presentations that draw from art history, performance studies, and more, conference participants will address issues such as why artists created work which implicitly rather than explicitly addressed AIDS, the afterlives of AIDS activism, and how AIDS changed American art. An artist panel will look at a broad range of artistic strategies during the worst years of the plague. The conference will also seek to address the current political climate, which demands asking questions of political strategy with a vigor reminiscent of the early years of AIDS activism.

SPONSORED BY :

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Speaker BiographiesFeatured Artwork

AMELIA JONES Robert A. Day Professor in Art and Design and Vice-Dean of Critical Studies at the Roski School of Art and Design at University of Southern California

Keynote: Queer Communion: Ron Athey’s Coalitional Performance of Extremity and Generosity

Amelia Jones is the Robert A. Day Professor at the Roski School of Art and Design at University of Southern California. A curator and a theorist and historian of art and performance, her recent publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012), Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History (2012), co-edited with Adrian Heathfield, the edited volume Sexuality (2014), and, co-edited with Erin Silver, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (2016). Her exhibition Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art took place in 2013 in Montreal. She programmed the events Trans-Montréal (2015) and Live Artists Live (at USC in 2016). She edited “On Trans/Performance,” a special issue of Performance Research (October 2016) and is currently organizing a show of Ron Athey’s work.

DAVID GETSY Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Topic: On Being a Public Artist with AIDS in 80s America: Scott Burton and Conformational Masking

David J. Getsy is the Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His current research focuses on queer and transgender tactics in modern and contemporary art and in art history’s methodologies. He is the author of Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale 2015), Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (Yale 2010), and Body Doubles: Sculpture in

Andres Serrano, Born New York, New York 1950 Milk/Blood, 1989, printed 2015, 27 1/2 x 40” Chromogenic color print, Exhibition printCourtesy of the Artist

The rich and deep colors of Andres Serrano’s Milk/Blood recall the pure, flat color of hard-edged abstract painting. But the simple saturated color fields in Serrano’s photo bear the evocative title Milk/Blood, two key vectors for transmission for the HIV virus. The image thus reveals itself to be an appropriation of the formal language of modernism for political purposes, a means of slipping AIDS consciousness into an image that was otherwise free to circulate in a museum context without fear of exclusion or censure. As with HIV infection itself, the photograph underscores how our key sense for understanding our world, vision, is unreliable in the face of AIDS.

Britain, 1877-1905 (Yale 2004). He has also published essays on contemporary artists such as Carlos Motta, Cassils, Jonah Groeneboer, Michelle Grabner, Catherine Opie, Kehinde Wiley, Slava Mogutin, Amber Hawk Swanson, and Ernesto Pujol. His edited volumes include Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965–1975 (Soberscove 2012), a co-edited special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on “Trans Cultural Production” (2014), and, most recently, the collection of artists’ writings, Queer, for the Whitechapel Gallery’s “Documents of Contemporary Art” book series (MIT 2016). He is currently completing a new book, preliminarily titled Private Made Public: Scott Burton’s Queer Postminimalism and Performance in the 1970s. Later this Spring, he will be Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London.

DEREK CONRAD MURRAY Associate Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz

Topic: Cruising towards a Queer of Color Critique

Derek Conrad Murray is an interdisciplinary theorist specializing in the history, theory and criticism of contemporary art, African-American/African Diaspora art and culture, and theoretical approaches to identity and representation. He has contributed to leading magazines and journals such as American Art, Art in

America, Parachute, Art Journal, Third Text, Consumption Markets & Culture and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (Duke University Press), where he currently serves as Associate Editor. Murray is also currently serving on the Editorial Board of Art Journal (CAA) and the Editorial Advisory Board of Third Text. Murray is the author of Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights (I.B. Tauris, UK, 2016).

JOSHUA CHAMBERS-LETSON Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University

Topic: Tseng Kwong Chi and the Party’s End

Joshua Chambers-Letson is assistant professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University where he also holds an appointment in the Program in Asian American Studies and Theatre. He is the author of A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America (NYU Press, 2013), winner of the 2014 Outstanding Book Award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), and is completing a book titled On the Work of Minoritarian Performance. He has published essays in journals that include Social Text, Political Theory, Criticism, Cultural Studies, MELUS, Journal of Asian American Studies, Women & Performance, and TDR. Along with Ann Pellegrini and Tavia Nyong’o he is a series co-editor of the Sexual Cultures series at NYU Press.

THEODORE TRIANDOS Visiting Lecturer in Visual Studies in the Department of Art at the University at Buffalo

Topic: “Mutually Incompatible Readings”: AIDS, Allegory, and the Limits of Postmodernist Art Criticism

Operating at the intersection of social history and critical theory, Theodore Triandos interrogates the bounds and breaks of dominant art epistemologies. His current project uses post-colonial and queer theoretical methods to reinterpret the historical

formation of contemporary art criticism. Triandos is a Lecturer in the department of Art and Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo. His recent graduate seminars have explored gender and sexuality in postmodernism and identity/identification theory.

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Speaker Biographies Speaker Biographies

JIH-FEI CHENG Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Scripps College

Topic: Development is a Façade: Dean Sameshima’s In Between (Days Without You) and the Queer Ecologies of Downtown Los Angeles

Jih-Fei Cheng is Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Scripps College. Previously, he worked in HIV/AIDS social services, managed a university cultural center, has been involved in arts and media production and curation, and has participated as a board or steering committee member for various queer of color community-based organizations in Los Angeles and New York City. Cheng’s research examines the intersections between science, media, surveillance, and social movements. His book manuscript, AIDS and Its Afterlives in Science and Media: Race, Gender, and the Queer Radical Imagination, examines how the experimental videos of feminist and queer of color AIDS activists’ produced during the U.S. early crisis years (1980s to early-1990s) continue to intervene into contemporary popular and activist media, scientific conceptions, and social movements. He is also at work on a second project that historicizes the late-nineteenth-century discovery of the first virus in the tobacco plant in relation to colonial ideas regarding race, reproduction, and infection. His published and forthcoming writings appear in Amerasia Journal; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; Women’s Studies Quarterly; AIDS Education and Prevention: An Interdisciplinary Journal; the Journal of American History; SUBLEVEL; and the Visual AIDS Blog.

MATTHEW JESSE JACKSON Associate Professor of Art History, Visual Arts, and the College at the University of Chicago

Conference Welcome/Panel ModeratorMatthew Jesse Jackson teaches at the University of Chicago in the departments of visual arts and art history.

JONATHAN KATZ Director of Visual Studies Doctoral Program and Associate Professor in Department of Art at the University at Buffalo

Topic: How AIDS Changed American Art

Jonathan D. Katz, a pioneering scholar of sexuality in post-war in art and culture, is Director of the Doctoral Program in Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo, and President Emeritus of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York, the world’s first queer art museum.

In 2010, he curated Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Smithsonian›s National Portrait Gallery, the first queer art exhibition at a major museum in US history. The exhibition won the best national museum exhibition award in the US, and his accompanying book won the prize for best queer non-fiction from the American Library Association. His large scale exhibition, Art AIDS America, is at the Alphawood Gallery in Chicago through April, having previously been seen in LA, Tacoma, Atlanta and New York. It is accompanied by an eponymous book. Katz has written widely on sexuality and postmodernism from the early 20th century through to the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, with a particular emphasis on the queer, post Abstract Expressionist generation including Johns, Rauschenberg, Twombly, Cage, Cunningham, Kelly, Warhol, Indiana, Martin, etc. Katz founded the Lesbian and Gay Studies program at Yale University, and was the founding chair of the very first Department of Lesbian and Gay Studies in the United States at City College of San Francisco in 1990. A veteran political activist as well as a scholar, Katz co-founded the activist group Queer Nation, San Francisco, and founded the Queer Caucus of the College Art Association, and the Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco.

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Speaker Biographies Speaker Biographies

OLI RODRIGUEZ Artist and Assistant Professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Oli Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist working in filmmaking, photography, performance, installation, and writing. Currently, he is faculty in the Photography

Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). His projects conceptually intersect and dialogue within consent, queerness, childhood, and sexuality. His exhibition, The Great Refusal: Taking on New Queer Aesthetics at SAIC is the first explicitly queer show at the institution. He is a part of the monograph Confronting the Abject, named from his research themed class that he co-taught with Catherine Opie at SAIC. He just finished his book, The Papi Project, which archives the AIDS pandemic through his queer, people of color (POC) family in Chicago during the 1980s. LYNDALE, his feature length documentary delves into the complicated relationships between family members as they navigate childhood neglect, queer identities, and mental illness. Rodriguez has screened, performed, lectured, and exhibited his works internationally and nationally.

AVRAM FINKELSTEIN Artist

Avram Finkelstein is a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. His work has shown at MoMA, The Whitney Museum, The Cooper Hewitt Museum, and Kunsthalle Wien, and is in the permanent collections of MoMA, The Whitney, The New Museum The Metropolitan Museum, The

Victoria and Albert Museum and The Brooklyn Museum. He is featured in the artist oral history project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and his book for UC Press, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images is due out in October 2017. He has been interviewed by The New York Times, Frieze, Artforum, and Interview, and spoken about art, AIDS activism, LGBT cultural production, and the American Left at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and NYU.

KATE POLLASCH Curator, Art Historian, and Writer, Current Curatorial Resident at Chicago Artists Coalition

Kate Pollasch’s practice interrogates pre-existing notions of history and normativity through queer tactics, network theory, archival studies, and considerations of affect and digital pedagogy. In 2012, she curated the exhibition “Roger Brown: This Boy’s Own Story” of Chicago

Imagist artist Roger Brown’s artistic relationship to HIV, sexuality, mortality, and Chicago’s gay leather community. The exhibition unearthed previously censored artworks and archival materials from Brown’s career and resulted in Brown’s induction into the Visual AIDS Artist Registry. Pollasch holds a MA in Modern art History and Theory and an MA in Arts Administration and Cultural Policy from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has held positions with The American Visionary Art Museum, The Art institute of Chicago, the Roger Brown House Museum, Sullivan Galleries, and most recently Rhona Hoffman Gallery. She has lectured at The Chicago History Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The University of Chicago and is a contributing writer for New City, The Seen, and Elite Daily.

PATRIC MCCOYCollector and Photo Journalist

Patric McCoy has recently retired from a 28 year career as an environmental scientist in the Air and Radiation Division of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (USEPA) Regional Office in Chicago. Mr. McCoy has been collecting contemporary African American art for 48 years and has a collection of over 1300 pieces of fine

art, 90% done by Chicago artists. In 2003 he co-founded Diasporal Rhythms a not-for-profit 501(c)3 arts organization comprised of informed and passionate art collectors from Chicago’s African American communities. Mr. McCoy was an amatuer photo journalist during the 1980s and captured many images of the denizens of Black Chicago’s downtown social scene while commuting to and around the Loop’s hot spots.

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Speaker Biographies Speaker Biographies

ArtAIDSAmericaChicago.org#ArtAIDSChi

UPCOMING IN-GALLERY STAGE SERIES

FINAL WEEKS!ThroughApril 2, 2017Alphawood Gallery2401 North Halsted StreetChicago

Free and open to public

Wednesday-Thursday | 11 am - 8 pmFriday-Saturday-Sunday | 11 am - 6 pm

About Face Theatre Presents AIDS ON STAGE Mondays in March | 7 pm Since 2013, AFT’s OUT FRONT Series has presented workshops and readings of new and developmental works exploring LGBTQIA themes. For our 21st season, in conjunction

with the groundbreaking exhibition Art AIDS America at Alphawood Gallery, About Face will

present AIDS ON STAGE, a series of readings from HIV/AIDS focused plays to provide a retrospective

look at how theatre artists have addressed the devastating health crisis throughout the decades. The readings will take place at Alphawood Gallery. Admission is free, however reservations are recommend.

March 13 | Jeffrey | by Paul RudnickMarch 20 | In the Continuum | by Danai Gurira and Nikkole SalterMarch 27 | And All the Dead Lie Down | by Harrison David Rivers

Art AIDS America was organized by Tacoma Art Museum in partnership with The Bronx Museum of the Arts.In Chicago, this exhibition is made possible by the Alphawood Foundation, a Chicago-based, grant-making private foundation working for an equitable, just and humane society.

Art AIDS America

FRIDAY, MARCH 10 | 7 pm - 8 pmSATURDAY, MARCH 11 | 9:30 am - 5 pm

VIRALREPRESENTATION:ON AIDS AND ARTA Conference on artistic responses to AIDS in America

The Alphawood Foundation, the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts,and Department of Art History at the University of Chicago present: