Blackness/Gender/Sexuality & Dis-ease: HIV/AIDS Art History

Since the emergence of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), artists have been central to the fight against the state's violence and neglect of those with HIV/AIDS. In this story, however, race and gender are marginalized as frameworks that shape this arts activism. This course takes up black art production that responds to the HIV/AIDS crisis to provide a longer, fuller, and more vital cultural narrative. By centering blackness in this story, we can ask how does dis-ease,referencing both infection and an aesthetically and structurally anxious relation to death,shape black art practices and lives? How have race and gender been used to conceptualize disease? And how do filmmakers, abstract painters, photographers, and poets help us to better comprehend blackness, gender, and sexuality under the threat of disease? After providing an overview of the relation between blackness, sexuality, and dis-ease and the emergence of the AIDS crisis, we will consider canonical works from the height of the crisis produced by filmmaker Marlon Riggs and poet Essex Hemphill. From there, we will move to themes of black art and mourning, black women's under cited activism, the controversial use of documentary photography in the crisis, black masculinity, diasporic responses, and the urgency and erasure of the ongoing crisis. Each week we will focus on a cultural text (film, painting, photograph, poem), a reading to provide historical context, and critical theories that will illuminate the art works' formal qualities and importance for our now.