A Day With(out) Art History: Art history and the AIDS epidemic

Since 1989, Visual AIDS have organised Day Without Art on December 1, World AIDS Day — changed to Day With(out) Art in 1998. They describe the project as “an international day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis” — led by art workers (curators, writers, and art professionals) and focussed primarily on galleries and museums. For example, as reported in the New York Times, the Met “removed Picasso’s 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein for the weekend, replacing it with a somber black-and-white placard about AIDS.”

This panel will consider the various effects that HIV/AIDS has had on art history — not just in terms of subject matter, but also as a discipline — thinking beyond particular artists and interrogating notions of artistic community. How were gallerists, collectors, and curators affected? What about the art historians lost to AIDS? How did institutions — including universities, colleges, and museums — respond to the crisis?

Papers are invited that engage with and address, among other topics: curatorial and editorial responses to HIV/AIDS around the world, for example Nan Goldin’s 1989 exhibition, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing; critical engagement with art historical scholarship, particularly critics and academics who were lost to AIDS, such as Craig Owens; and methodological innovations, akin to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of reparative reading. Moreover, what are the ethical considerations at play in revisiting the history of the HIV epidemic today?