California Journal, April 5, 1988, p. 100

The first show about woman and AIDS: Until That Last Breath (at the SOMAR Gallery through March 31) is the brainchild of photographer Ann Meredith and consists of 50 of her large scale photographs, seven sculptural "shrines" created by female persons with AIDS, and audio tapes and texts of their stories. Meredith's involvement with the project grew from her realization that women are "invisible AIDS patients" and from her work with the San Francisco AIDS Foundation's support/therapy group for women PWAs, reportedly the only one in the country. While the cases of women with AIDS more than doubled between 1981 and 1987 to 7 percent of the total, that figure likely reflects under-reporting. "So many PWAs are single mother heads-of-households who need anonymity," Meredith sighed. "It took months before anyone would allow me to photograph them." The show's title was inspired by the words of PWA Meredith M., a 33-year mother of two: "Yes AIDS is a terrible disease. But we still dream. We still live.... The focus of this show is not to show us as emaciated or on our last breath... The purpose is to show that until that last breath entire lives are still going on." Currently working on a videotape to document these reflections and personal histories, Meredith is hopeful the tape will be finished before the exhibition opens in New York at the New Museum next February. She can be contacted at 460 40th Street, Oakland, CA 94609 or 415-655-7289.

Busing, June 26, 1990, p. 92

Controversy swirls around Gran Fury - the aptly named art collective affiliated with ACT UP - like televangelists around a collection plate. Their procondom, anti - Cardinal O'Connor text-and-image-works for the current Venice Biennale weathered the vagaries of Italian Customs, the ire of Biennale director Gionvanni Carandente, and the scrutiny of the Italian legal system. When the art activists returned from Venice in early June, their bus-poster contribution to the Art Against AIDS campaign in Chicago was being used to transform the Big Potato into the world's art censorship capital. Again.

The work in question is Gran Fury's already widely seen takeoff on a Benetton ad - an image of homo- and heterosexual couples kissing beneath the dictum "Kissing doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do." It was slated for bus-side presentation this month, but the Chicago Transit Authority sold the donated advertising space (per its contractual right). Art Against AIDS then politely assured CTA - which cannot legally censor public service announcements - that a later date would be fine.

In the meantime, the work had become a lightning rod for AIDS-phobia and homophobia. Alderman Robert Shaw, the same goon who led the 1988 assault on the David Nelson portrait of Mayor Washington, called the poster a "camouflage" to propagate homosexuality. State representative Monique Davis termed it "a subtle seduction of young people on the CTA."

Mayor Richard Daley did not succumb to the rampant homophobia, and on June 8 supported the recommendation that the issue be referred to the City Council's Transportation Committee, which is widely regarded as a local burial ground. The real test will be whether the posters go up later in the year. Would that the whole world were watching.

Estate Project, 1991

Artist Tony Feher is a 36-year-old Texan who lives in the East Village and supports himself by working for dealers of other artists. He regularly shows his scatter-style art (recently at the Andrea Rosen gallery), but he is not represented by Rosen, or by any other gallery. Like so many New York artists, he is infected with the HIV virus.

Feher is one of the subjects profiled in a valuable series of publications produced by the Alliance for the Arts's Estate Project for Artists With AIDS. Its fat, book-length report targets institutions; and its free, 32-page guide, Future Safe, was designed for artists.

Healthwise, Feher has been lucky. He's asymptomatic and he has health insurance--acquired from New York Artists' Equity before he was diagnosed and currently costing him an "outrageous" $1000 each quarter. Although he admires Future Safe's down-to-earth advice for writing will and cataloguing artworks, he's chosen to devote himself to making--rather than preserving--his art. "It's ironic because I've catalogued Scott Burton's [who died of AIDS] personal collection, and I'm doing inventory right now for Paula Cooper," he laughs. "You think that someday you'll get a gallery to send over an intern and do all that stuff for you."

But Feher admits that he's been affected by his involvement with the Estate Project, "I am trying to keep track of my work now and I know that I need a will." Before we part conversational ways, Feher draws my attention to Future Safe's subtitle, "Estate Planning for Artists in a Time of AIDS": "The implication [of the subtitle] is that this guide is for everyone." (The Alliance for the Arts can be reached at 947-6340.) . . . Speaking of AIDS and art, the Public Art Fund's long in-the-works Public Art Issues devoted to AIDS has been published. It's available for $5 at St. Mark's Bookshop.

De-Evolution, July 27, 1993, p. 98

When you enter the Museum of Natural History's lavish new hall of Human Biology and Evolution, bear right at the holograms of the human body. Across from a vitrine labeled "musculoskeletal system" you'll see an oddly empty, inset metal "frame" that's comparable to nearby displays about bodily systems-urinary, respiratory, and the like. It's the only empty frame in the exhibition, and according to four museum staffers, a volunteer, and two creative consultants who helped design the hall-it was built to house information about the immune system, even though the curatorial powers that be had nixed the plan.

Scientific knowledge hardly exists in a social vacuum. "The immune system is currently central to investigations of cancer-especially breast cancer-and AIDS," one staffer told me. Another-all seven informants insisted on anonymity for professional reasons-noted that far more is now known about the immune system than when planning for the exhibit began around three years ago. But that hasn't stopped other museums from opening exhibitions about the immune system and HIV, among them the New York Hall of Science, the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles, and San Francisco's Exploratorium. In fact, the Centers for Disease Conrol encourages their creation through the National AIDS Exhibit Consortium. By contrast, the publicly funded Museum of Natural History's chief HIV-related exhibition effort was a 1988 temporary show of historical artifacts called "In Time of Plague."

Exhibit curator and anthropology department chair Ian Tattersall explained (through museum spokesperson Jeanne Collins) that the immune system is mentioned only briefly, in connection with the circulatory system, because it is not an anatomical system. (Then shouldn't it be treated substantively elsewhere?) So why did the frame get built after the immune-system display had been vetoed? Tattersall asserted that the display space is nonfunctional and that there are no plans for it. (Others dispute these claims, although no one currently working in exhibition construction is talking.) For one consultant involved in the early stages of the hall's planning, "The bottom line is that we have a duty to provide this information.... We should be visionary if this display is intended to last 20 years." Or, as Ellen Futter, the museum's newly appointed president, told the Times on June 29, "...This museum will take up [the issues of] the environment, biodiversity, ethical questions, human biology and cultural diversity." The just-opened Hall of Human Biology and Evolution is one place to begin.

NIMBY Epidemic?, June 8, 1993

"Soho is a treasure and should be guarded and protected," art dealer Tony Shafrazi wrote city Health Systems Agency staffer Arnold Haber in an April 27 letter obtained by the Voice. The histrionic missive opposing Housing Works' proposed day-treatment facility for people with AIDS is a Freudian's dream: The dealer who splashed paint across Picasso's Guernica calls the planned Greene and Grand Street facility "destructively criminal" and its "placement in this model community...an absolute crime." (Since I am neither Janet Malcolm nor Jeffrey Masson, I will simply note that Shafrazi's gallery appears to float entirely on the proceeds from the sales of work by the late, AIDS-afflicted Keith Haring and his friend Kenny Scharf.)

Soho-ites already know Housing Works' plan for a badly needed treatment center has split their nabe; non-Soho-ites who've dealt with the Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) crowd certainly won't be shocked by the news. Ironically, central Soho is one of the city's few neighborhoods providing no social service facilities in a community board district with one of the highest rates of HIV infection in New York. A bigger irony is that Housing Works's facility is no poorly (as in city-) run homeless shelter; in fact, it's no homeless shelter at all. Citizens who attended a neighborhood forum at the Drawing Center on May 18, learned that the 70-client-per-day program will be open only between 9am and 5pm, that needles won't be exchanged, and that active TB and drug problems are likely to be reduced in Soho because of the treatment center. The facility is designed to centralize medical and social services for PWAs living nearby, in other words, to create-rather than destroy-a community.

The program's opponents-spearheaded by the Soho Alliance-seem far less concerned about the divisive effects on the neighborhood of their misinformation campaign and their methods of persuasion. Architect Larry Bogdanow reported at the forum that his Greene Street co-op board's contribution of $1000 to the loose-with-the-facts opposition pushed him into the active supporters' camp. Other neighborhood residents at the meeting noted that their boards were asking for three-figure per unit assessments to fight the facility, while two dealers privately complained to me that they've been warned by co-ops not to speak out on behalf of Housing Works if they want their leases renewed. In one sense, the negative campaign is succeeding: it's generated scores of letters to pols like Manhattan beep Ruth Messinger, who's uncharacteristically straddling the fence and councilperson Kathryn Freed, who's broadcasting-let's be charitable-mixed messages. Now the action moves to Albany and City Hall where Housing Works's proposal must be approved by the state's Department of Health and the city's Buildings Department.

Obviously, neither boho-chic Soho nor the so-called art community is a monolith. Despite the views of Shafrazi and his ilk, those dealers, artists, and organization heads supporting Housing Works include Brooke and Caroline Alexander, Ida Applebroog, Pamela Auchincloss, Josh Baer, Leo Castelli, Paula Cooper, Joe Fawbush, Emily Harvey, Jeanette Ingberman, Elizabeth Murray, and Ann Philbin, among many others. For information on how to help-or just plain information-call Anna Blume at 925-5805.

P.C. in Paris, February 1, 1994

I recently returned from Paris where I lectured at the Šcole Nationale SupÈrieure des Beaux-Arts - about political correctness, of all things. P.C. threatens to knock Madonna and Michael Jackson off Gallic media radar screens, but at least M & M have set foot in France. I saw nothing remotely resembling socially engaged art, making the Parisian artworld's newfound p.c. mania something like Poland's anti-Semitism without Jews. (A deeply reactionary editorial in the January issue of Art Press conveys some sense of what I mean.) I did see - and heard much more about - two poster-works by artist Olivier Blanckart currently marring pristine walls in the chic Marais and Bastille gallery districts: One reads "L'art contre le sida ne sert · rien: mettez des capotes" ("Art against AIDS serves no purpose: use rubbers") and the other "David Hammons est politically correct" (likewise Felix Gonzales-Torres, Hans Haacke, and Peter Fend).

Blanckart, an artist with a lust for notoriety rivaling Jeff Koons's, came to my lecture and revealed none of Koons's, well, subtlety. He informed a bewildered audience that he actually yearns for more politically pointed art ("No one talks about AIDS in the French artworld," he bellowed repeatedly) and weirdly dismissed Hammons's work (admittedly never seen in person) as overly African American. Blanckart also explained that he transformed the gallery site of his most recent show into an AIDS information center, a spectacularly ineffectual gesture since Parisian galleries are drawing practically no visitors during these days of ultrarecession.