Art AIDS America

This groundbreaking exhibition underscores the deep and unforgettable presence of HIV in American art. More than ten years in the making, the exhibition of 120 works was organized by the Tacoma Art Museum in partnership with The Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Since its discovery, AIDS has shaped art, politics, medicine, and pop culture. This is the first comprehensive overview exclusively focused on 30 years of art made in response to the epidemic in the United States, and the impact on the development of American art as a whole. It introduces and explores the whole spectrum of artistic responses to AIDS, from the politically outspoken to the quietly mournful, surveying works from the early 1980s to the present.

Credit: Exhibition Overview from the Bronx Museum and Tacoma Art Museum websites.

Whether or not you go, the exhibition catalog, Art AIDS America , explores the role of HIV/AIDS in shifting the development of American art away from the cool conceptual foundations of postmodernism and toward a new, more insistently political and autobiographical voice. Surveys more than 100 works of American art from the early 1980s to the present, reintroducing and exploring the spectrum of artistic responses to HIV/AIDS, from in-your-face activism to quiet elegy.