Still Beginning: The 30th Annual Day With(out) Art
For the thirtieth annual Day With(out) Art, Visual AIDS has partnered with museums, galleries, universities, and organizations around the world to present over 100 free screenings of STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven newly commissioned videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic by Shanti Avirgan, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Carl George, Viva Ruiz, Iman Shervington, Jack Waters/Victor F.M. Torres, and Derrick Woods-Morrow.
The hour-long video program will premiere on Sunday, December 1, 2019, World AIDS Day — and Newcomb Art Museum in partnership with The Office for Gender and Sexual Diversity at Tulane University and Carolyn Barber Pierre Center for Intercultural Life at Tulane will screen STIILL BEGINNING for free on December 3 at 7 pm in Freeman Auditorium.
The seven short videos range in subject from anti-stigma work in New Orleans to public sex culture in Chicago, highlighting pioneering AIDS activism and staging intergenerational conversations. Recalling Gregg Bordowitz’s reminder that “THE AIDS CRISIS IS STILL BEGINNING,”* the video program resists narratives of resolution or conclusion, considering the continued urgency of HIV/AIDS in the contemporary moment while revisiting resonant cultural histories from the past three decades.
About Day With(out) Art:
In 1989, Visual AIDS organized the first Day Without Art, a call to the art world for mourning and action in response to the AIDS crisis. More than 800 arts organizations, museums and galleries participated by shrouding artworks and replacing them with information about HIV and safer sex, locking their doors or dimming their lights, and producing exhibitions, programs, readings, memorials, rituals, and performances. Every year since, Visual AIDS has coordinated and publicized events on December 1, World AIDS Day, to highlight the ongoing epidemic.
In 1998, Day Without Art became Day With(out) Art, the parentheses encouraging the inclusion of programming about the AIDS pandemic and work by artists living with HIV. Thirty years on, STILL BEGINNING recognizes the important and necessary work of artists, activists, and cultural workers who have responded to AIDS while emphasizing the persistent presence of the epidemic.
