An Army of Lovers: ART+Positive Artists In Conversation
An Army of Lovers: ART+Positive Artists In Conversation
An Army of Lovers: ART+Positive Artists In Conversation will feature members of the artist / activist collective including Aldo Hernández, Lola Flash and Dennis Davidson, to discuss their impactful art and political actions. Images and dialogue will highlight ART+Positive’s anti-Jesse Helms protest on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1989; their collective exhibitions, including “An Army Of Lovers: Combating AIDS, Homophobia and Censorship” at PS122 in 1990; and their collaborative large-scale Positive Flag, Negative Flag, 1990, among other agitprop projects.
The intergenerational event is organized by Alex Fialho and moderated by Vivian Crockett, and will also include comments by the steward of the ART+Positive archives Dr. Daniel Berger, to celebrate the publication of Militant Eroticism: The ART+Positive Archives, edited by Berger and John Neff and published by Sternberg Press in 2017.
ART+Positive was an influential affinity group of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) / New York, responding to government neglect of the AIDS crisis and the conservative homophobia and censorship of the Culture Wars. ART+Positive’s collective aesthetic embodied a “militant eroticism” centering queer sexuality and raw, powerful freedom of expression.
Art+Positive artist biographies:
Dennis Davidson is a research artist, museum advisor and curator of immersive visual experiences that help people see and understand the new planetary and interstellar geographies of the universe. In 1989, Davidson joined ART+Positive and collaborated with its members to make advocacy graphics, visuals, and video for demonstrations, street posters, art exhibits and public communication.
Lola Flash is an American photographer whose work has often focused on social, LGBTQ+ and feminist issues. An active participant in ACT UP during the time of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, Flash was notably featured in the 1989 "Kissing Doesn't Kill" poster.
Aldo Hernández began his artistic projects and activism in California before moving to NYC in 1985. He was working at Creative Time when he joined ACT UP in 1988, and the following year he co-founded ART+Positive. In 1990 Hernández began his DJ career at the Clit Club and Meat, where he applied his passion of music & the visual arts. His new ART+Active group photography calendar is out November 30.
Additional speaker biographies:
Dr. Daniel Berger is a leading HIV specialist in the U.S. He is Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Illinois and medical director and founder of Northstar Medical Center, the largest private HIV-treatment and research center in Greater Chicago. Dr. Berger is also an active patron of the arts. In 2010 he founded Iceberg Projects, a Chicago alternative exhibition space. In 2015 Berger acquired the archives of ART+Positive and with John Neff, curated the first exhibition of the archives at Iceberg Projects in May of that year. In December 2017, he and Neff publishedMilitant Eroticism: The ART+Positive Archives with Sternbeg Press in Berlin.
Vivian Crockett is a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University specializing in modern and contemporary art and focusing largely on art of African diasporas, (Afro)Latinx diasporas, and the Americas at the varied intersections of race, gender, and queer theory. Her scholarly and cultural work seeks to foster the remembrance and visioning of cultural spaces and practices that merge a commitment to artistic and cultural production with sociopolitical justice and collective liberation. She was the co-curator of Visual AIDS' 28th annual Day With(out) Art, ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS.
Alex Fialho, as Programs Director at Visual AIDS, facilitates projects around both the history and immediacy of the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic, with particular stakes intervening against the widespread whitewashing of HIV/AIDS cultural narratives. Fialho spent multiple days in the ART+Positive Archive this Fall, and was deeply inspired and galvanized by the charged, sexy, powerful politics of the collective.
