Broadsides & Cookies: World AIDS Day '08

On December 1, 1989, the same year the UN announced the first World AIDS Day, the organization Visual AIDS (VA) launched "Day Without Art." This national day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis involved shutting down museums, sending staff to volunteer at AIDS services, sponsoring special exhibitions of work about AIDS, or, as I have done in the past as a gallery director, draping objects on view with black cloth and setting up a candle light vigil. In 1997, Day Without Art become a Day With Art, to recognize and promote increased programming of cultural events that draw attention to the continuing pandemic. According to the VA website, "the name was retained as a metaphor for the chilling possibility of a future day without art or artists." Adding parentheses to the program title, Day With(out) Art highlights the proactive programming of art projects by artists living with HIV/AIDS, and art about AIDS, that are taking place around the world. By mobilizing the visual arts communities, VA raises money to provide direct services to artists living with HIV/AIDS.

Every year, VA offers a set of artist-designed broadsides that promote harm reduction, HIV prevention and AIDS awareness; and target diverse communities. Broadsides for 2008 include the image above by Kate Huh. She writes:

"In my work as an artist and a disability rights activist, I've spent many years thinking about the human body/mind and all the things that can happen within it or to it. The text in this broadside reflects notions of human fears. The image of the face is from a self-portrait I made when I was 18 years old, the year my first friend died of AIDS. His name was Bob. He got a cold and was dead three weeks later. It was not even called AIDS back then, it was called GRID (gay-related immune deficiency). My expression reflects stoic resolve in the face of an unknown future, eyes wide open, ready to bare witness. The vulva, ever present in my consciousness as a dyke, is from a medical text on the genitalia of homosexual women. I've removed it from its sterile, clinical context and placed it beside my face as a source of comfort and beauty. The warmth of my sexuality and my friendships within the queer community have nourished me throughout these years of the AIDS pandemic. My wish is that other people have had this experience as well, gaining a deep understanding for the importance of loving the human body with respect and seeing the suffering of all people as being equal."

Participating artists in previous years have included rising art star Ginger Brooks Takahashi, and Brooklyn-based artists Deborah Grant and Nayland Blake. (Click on the name of each artist to download their broadside.)

Today's OBAMA BITS report from EURweb.com leaps from the highly anticipated Clinton announcement to chocolate chunk cookies. It reads:

Sales of chocolate chunk cookies at Baby Boomers Café in Des Moines, Iowa have jumped from 400 in a good week to more than 1,000 per week ever since the Obamas expressed affection for the treat. The family visited the place often during the summer of 2007, when the Illinois senator devoted much of his time to Iowa. Obama's main office was next door to Boomers, and his daughters – Malia and Sasha – would stop by with their mother, Michelle. Word got out about the Obamas' chocolate chunk love during a stop in Iowa last month, when his staff ordered about a dozen cookies for the family. Soon, sales jumped with requests coming from as far away as Mexico.

An article today in The Vindicator, a small regional paper in Youngstown, Ohio, brings together chocolate chip cookies and the enduring stigma of AIDS. Sean Barron writes, "Eggs, chocolate chips and other foods are more than key ingredients for making chocolate chip cookies: They also individually and collectively represent essential elements of teamwork—a key ingredient in fighting AIDS." Barron recounts the words of motivational speaker Karen Vadino who used the analogy of the individual ingredients to "point out that people’s personal qualities and talents are vital for effective teamwork." In today's New York Times, a hopeful article says researchers at the World Health Organization have come up with a suggestion to drastically reduce the transmission of AIDS and virtually halt the widening epidemic in Africa within a decade. Read more here.