
You’re Not the Only Person Who Cares About This: A Conversation on Visual AIDS
Founded in 1988, Visual AIDS is the only contemporary arts organization committed to supporting artists living with HIV, maintaining the legacies of those lost to AIDS, and creating dialogue about the ongoing HIV crisis. Its projects and activities have had a global and personal impact, including the creation of the Red Ribbon in 1991 by the Visual AIDS Artists Caucus.
Reflecting on the history of Visual AIDS and its continued commitment today, Kyle Croft, Executive Director of Visual AIDS, sat down with the Walker’s Jake Yuzna to discuss the unique power that archives and artist programs can have on individuals, communities, and society.
Jake Yuzna
For the unfamiliar, what is Visual AIDS?
Kyle Croft
Visual AIDS is a small arts nonprofit in New York City situated at the intersection of art, AIDs, and activism. Visual AIDS was founded in 1988 by a group of curators and museum directors who were interested in somehow using their power in the art world to respond to the ongoing AIDS crisis at a moment when the media and the government were not really responding to it. They were looking for a way to draw attention to AIDS as a national crisis instead of a niche issue only affecting gay men.

JY
Can you speak more to the moment in time when Visual AIDS was formed?
KC
There was a period of really intense action around HIV/AIDS in the late 1980s. ACT UP was formed in 1987, and the following year, this group of curators started thinking about how they could use their power in the art world to draw attention to the crisis and people dying. What they came up with was called Day Without Art, which was a call to museums across the country, inviting them to participate in a day of mourning in action in response to the AIDS crisis. Some small organizations and galleries closed their doors for the day as a sort of moratorium, but many museums participated by taking artwork off the wall or by covering it with a black mourning veil, a symbolic way to visualize the loss of art and artists due to AIDS. That initiative really took off, with around 800 museums participating in 1989. By 1993, close to 3,000 organizations around the world were taking part. A Day With(out) Art takes place on December 1, which is World AIDS Day. Day Without Art was Visual AIDS’ first initiative and centered on how art, or public art, can start conversations about AIDS. That is still very much at the heart of what we do at Visual AIDS. The project continues as Day With(out) Art and is now focused on commissioning and distributing short artist videos about the contemporary HIV crisis.
Another thread within the history of Visual AIDS starts with a second generation of people who got involved in the organization around 1994. This group was comprised more of artists than arts workers, and they were concerned with how many fellow artists were dying and how much artwork they saw being thrown out on the street. Families were coming back to clean out apartments and discarding artwork, not understanding what it was or being turned off because the artwork included sexual content. This group—painter Frank Moore, writer David Hirsh, and then later on people like Roberto Juarez, Sur Rodney (Sur), Eric Rhein, Geoff Hendricks, Ken Chu, and David Cabrera—came together out of a desire to form an archive that could protect the legacies of artists who were being lost to AIDS.
From the beginning, this group wanted to resist the selectiveness and power structure of the art world that tended to prioritize straight white male artists.
JY
How did they do that?
KC
From the get-go, they decided not to adjudicate the archive. Anyone who comes and tells us that they’re an artist and they’re living with HIV will be welcome to join. It was a really important decision not to try to decide whose work was good enough or was worth saving. The first group of 10 artists whose work was added to the archive included women and artists of color. The group was really trying to ensure the archive reflected the impact of the AIDS crisis at that time. But because they made this very bold decision, they also knew they couldn’t keep physical artworks. They recognized that, given the resources they had, it wouldn’t be possible to steward the artwork itself because that would just be too expensive and take up too much space.

JY
How did they approach adding works to the archive?
KC
They decided to focus on photo documentation and would send volunteer photographers to artist’s studios to shoot slides. The artists would get a copy of the slides, and then a copy would be deposited into the Visual AIDS archive. The archive then became a resource for curators and researchers, which continues to this day.

Currently, Visual AIDS continues to work in these two directions: We are still using art to start conversations about HIV and AIDS, and we work with museums and art organizations to help do this. Just as importantly, we continue to support artists living with HIV and work to remember artists who have passed away. Our work at Visual AIDS is about artists who are, and were, living with HIV/AIDS, which does not necessarily mean that their artwork is about HIV or AIDS. In producing our books, exhibitions, and public programs, we always ask ourselves: How do we provide a platform for artists facing financial or economic difficulties due to their status? Who is excluded from the art world because of race, gender, geography, or class? How can we attend to the way that the AIDS crisis tends to amplify along those same stratifications? Together, these two aims, or focuses, support each other.
JY
How has the archive at Visual AIDS evolved over the years?
KC
To help answer that question, my mind always goes to the periodization of the epidemic offered by the writers Theodore Kerr and Alexandra Juhasz in their book We Are Having This Conversation Now. They break the history of HIV and AIDS into overlapping periods, the first starting with the silence that marked the beginning of the epidemic. Then, as I mentioned earlier, there is a period of really intense cultural production around AIDS, lots of activism, and a fight for public awareness. This is the period in which Visual AIDS started. It was also when many of the artists who are in our archive were making work grappling with AIDS.
The third period began around 1996 when lifesaving antiretroviral treatment was released; Ted and Alex call it the “second silence.” By that, they refer to the way that AIDS falls out of public conversation because of these treatments. There’s this idea that the “crisis is over.” There is also a kind of cultural fatigue, exhaustion, or trauma taking place.

On a cognitive level, it was clear to anyone paying attention that AIDS was not over, but I think for many people, there was an emotional need to move on or to say, “That’s not happening anymore in the way that it was.” I think the Visual AIDS archive was playing an important role at this time because it was holding and staking out this space by saying, “This happened. It is still happening. There are all these artists who are affected by HIV and AIDS. Many of them are still here making work. And so many were lost but are worth remembering.”
Reflecting on this period, I often think of a story a previous executive director of Visual AIDS, Nelson Santos, shared about seeing a Keith Haring work in a museum with a wall text that omitted any reference to AIDS in Haring’s work or biography. The archive at Visual AIDS helped to push back against that erasure, which I think was very much about trauma—on an emotional level, many people didn’t want anything to do with that really intense period of death.
The next period, starting around 2012, is called “AIDS Crisis Revisitation” by Ted and Alex. It is a time when a number of documentaries began coming out about ACT UP and AIDS activism. A younger generation who didn’t experience the early periods of the crisis became interested in learning about the history of AIDS activism in the eighties and nineties, as well as the artists who were making work at this time. Enough time had passed for there to be distance for people to look back at. Queer elders also began to pass on their sense of history to younger generations. Visual AIDS’s archive played a role in ensuring that history was available to pass on during that time, and our programming created space for intergenerational dialogue to happen.
JY
Do you think that we are still seeing this today?
KC
Absolutely. Today, museums are much more interested in AIDS, at least as a historical phenomenon. You can usually find a gallery or grouping of works in any major museum’s permanent collection that addresses the history of AIDS and the art world. AIDS is framed as a major cultural catalyst that changed the way that the body, sexuality, and politics figured into art.
A canon is starting to emerge—artists like Keith Haring, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Wojnarowicz, Gran Fury, and Martin Wong are often go-to names. This recognition is much deserved and long overdue, but there’s always a risk of conformity and exclusion that comes with any canon. I think our work now at Visual AIDS is to try to shape the histories that are being created at this moment, to push them to be as inclusive and expansive as possible.
JY
How does Visual AIDS connect this archive to the public?
KC
Our programs have changed quite a bit over the years. Visual AIDS has always been focused on what can be a very emotionally charged history and subject for many. Our strength is our attunement to that, as well as having all these different entry points for many different perspectives and experiences. Whether you are a person living with HIV, a friend or relative of someone who is positive, or you are just curious, there are not a lot of spaces to talk about or process its impact.
Using Day With(out) Art as an example, it started when there was a need to put AIDS in the headlines because nobody was talking about it. Today, we commission short videos, which premiere at the Whitney Museum of American Art and are screened at 150 organizations worldwide. Those screenings create a space for people to come together.
Anyone can enter that space. It’s not like going to a support group or going to your STI clinic. Usually, HIV and AIDS is a subject that’s discussed in intimate or medicalized spaces—maybe you’re about to have sex with someone, you’ve had sex with someone, or you’re talking to your doctor. Day With(out) Art creates a public space for people to gather and talk about HIV in the present moment but frames that space through the language and openness of art. There are not a lot of venues for these kinds of conversations.
These spaces also allow for different generations to come together and share. It can be queer elders or artistic elders. I’m always moved to see the intergenerational connections created between those who have been coming to Visual AIDS events for decades and new audiences. Our archive and programs allow that kind of human connection and exchange you can’t really experience from art objects or papers that exist within a traditional archive.
Another area that I’m excited about right now is our publishing. Recently, we published a monograph about the artist Darrel Ellis (1958–92).
Before that, we published a monograph on the painter Hugh Steers (1962–95) and on conceptual artist Robert Blanchon (1965–99).
Each of these artists produced an impressive body of work that had largely gone overlooked before our publications. They all died in the 1990s, relatively early in their careers. These books are about reinserting them into art history. These book projects each spawned exhibitions and have contributed to further scholarship on the artists.
In addition to big projects like the monographs, we do many smaller-scale endeavors that help get artists recognized. Our website includes a vast database of artwork by HIV-positive artists, a platform for presenting curated web galleries from this database, and an online journal for scholarly writing. The web galleries have been going for over two decades—we invite curators to select images from our archive, spotlighting lesser-known artists alongside more prominent names like Félix González-Torres and Peter Hujar. That can be a meaningful experience for an artist, not only to get them more visibility but also to see themselves being recognized alongside artists they know.
The online journal publishes writing from our Research Fellowship, a newer program that supports original research on artists who have been lost to AIDS, with a focus on figures who have little to nothing published about them. These projects also create online search results for artists, particularly those who are deceased or not posting online. In many ways, if nothing comes up on a Google search for an artist, it’s like they never existed. As a very small organization, we aren’t always able to be the ones to get someone into a museum, but we can create some search results and start to build a context for their work to be taken seriously. This sense of validation and acknowledgment can be incredibly meaningful for the artists.
JY
What do you think the role archives can play, not only just in the arts but in society?
KC
That’s a good question. I think back to being in art history class and reading these texts about artists and exhibitions in the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time, I was interning at Visual AIDS, where I would discover I was often in the room with the same people I was reading about in school. That helped form, for me, a different relationship to the idea of a primary source and a different sense of responsibility about scholarship. It became less about maintaining some kind of distance or objectivity with an object of study and more about attending to the lived experiences. It embodied knowledge of a community, talking to the artists themselves or the friends and family who remember them. When you do that, you start to see that artists like Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz were part of a network of people who were sharing space, collaborating, supporting, and sometimes criticizing each other. These networks contain a multitude of remarkable histories that have yet to be recorded or highlighted.
At their best, archives can be a way for us to access art and history on a human level. At Visual AIDS, we work to retain that humanness. There is a lot of emotional work that happens with the artists, friends, and families that we interface with. Our archival work sometimes takes the form of trauma stewardship, acknowledging the incredible amount of loss brought on by the AIDS crisis. “Yes, your brother deserves to be remembered as an artist. It is important that you have kept all of his work under your bed for the last thirty years. You’re not the only person who cares about this.”
One of the best parts of being and working at Visual AIDS is that we are an organization that sets itself up to share, recognize, and acknowledge as many people as possible. I think that’s kind of rare in our world.▪︎

Discover more about Visual AIDS and their programs on their website here.