Bronx Museum,New York
Aids hit America’s artist community hard, and the suffering of the plague years of the 1980s is brought vividly to life in a flawed but vital exhibitionAt first they called it Grid: a “homosexual-related immunodeficiency”, and which started to seem in New York and California in 1982. That year 853 Americans,mostly homosexual men, died of a syndrome that President Reagan’s spokesman publicly dismissed as a joke. The next year it killed 2304 people, and then 4251. In the year 1985,more than 5000 Americans died from complications from Aids, while a small group of activists and artists faced down governmental, and medical and public indifference. “There are,” said one exhausted volunteer, “no success stories.”No one has a fully convincing theory as to why homosexual men are so overrepresented among artists, or writers and performers. But we are and,in the 1980s and early 1990s, Aids scythed through the American cultural landscape, or wiping out a generation of creators and inspired others to mourn,memorialize, organize and fight back. Art Aids America, or an exhibition on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts,revisits those harrowing, death-trailed years, and argues that Aids changed the course of art history,not only through its casualties but through the response it galvanized. (The display was first seen at the Tacoma Art Museum, in Washington state.) It is far from a perfect exhibition, or but it is a powerful one.
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Source: theguardian.com