Courtesy of Visual AIDS
Visual AIDS, the arts organization founded in 1988 to facilitate discussion about and raise awareness of HIV issues, began Day Without Art in 1989. The event, held each December 1, began with a call for work that would celebrate the lives and achievements of those lost to HIV/AIDS, encourage care, educate all communities about HIV infection, and help find a cure.
Since then, the event has grown and changed, shifting to “Day With(out) Art” in 1998 and adding a widely distributed video program in 2010. Today, the video screenings, which are commissioned by Visual AIDS to correspond with each year’s theme, are held at more than 100 venues. Among them is The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, which this year will expand its Day With(out) Art event thanks in part to the work of Crystal Ellis, who co-advised the programming for Day With(out) Art: Enduring Care. It will also be the state’s only screening of the 2021 program.
Ellis, a member of the CAM junior board who is also a Sexual Health Training Coordinator at Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region, connected with friend and colleague Molly Pearson this summer, and the pair discussed doing something more comprehensive than the Visual AIDS videos on a loop to mark the day. After discussing their ideas with CAM, a panel and resource fair was planned to accompany the video program.
“World AIDS Day is a really big event for AIDS service organizations, and this year is no different,” says Ellis. “But it is also highlighting the 40th year commemoration of the first medical diagnosis of the HIV crisis. However, St. Louis has the unique history of Robert Rayford, a St. Louis Black teen who died from what they now know was HIV/AIDS complications [in 1969]. So we have the 40th year official anniversary, but we also recognize in St. Louis that Robert Rayford, his story is a part of the HIV/AIDS story, that his name should be included in the conversation.”
Courtesy of The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Crystal Ellis.
Community care was the only option for Rayford and others like him who were living with HIV/AIDS before HIV service organizations and medicine caught up with the needs of the community, and it remains vital today. The year’s theme, “Enduring Care,” puts that concept at the center of the conversation through videos that tell “stories of collective care, mutual aid, and the rise of a solidarity movement that recast community work as a form of medicine.” Ellis and others assembled a panel for the event that could speak to the varied and important services that communities provide. The panel will be moderated by artist, activist, Black liberationist, and Visual AIDS featured artist charles ryan long and will feature founder of The Griot Museum of Black History and host of the Impact HIV/AIDS Initiative Lois Conley, Community Wellness Project Senior Outreach Specialist Montrelle Day, and Community Wellness Project Transgender-women Intervention Specialist and MO Ho Justice Coalition Coordinator Miyonnee Hickman.
“It was important that we hand-pick these specific people, simply because they're well-respected in the communities that they belong to...When talking about HIV/AIDS, it not only impacts the person who is infected, but their community at large,” says Ellis. “How have people, whether or not they're HIV positive or negative, how have they been caring for their community, and caring specifically for their HIV-positive community? This is meant to tie it all in. Through this and the Visual AIDS program we really get a well-rounded perspective, and an international perspective, all the way down to the micro level, which is St. Louis.”
Local service organizations, including the City of St. Louis Department of Health, Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, Project ARK, and What Would an HIV Doula Do?, will all be tabling at the event, and the panel discussion begins at 6 p.m. The Visual AIDS video screening begins at 7 p.m.
Among the seven commissioned short films, each of which runs about eight minutes, are stories that reflect on stigma, harm-reduction practices, prison activism, and the effects of long-term medical care. One filmmakers, Kat Cheairs, has been merging art and AIDS activism for the past two decades. Her Day With(out) Art film, Voices at the Gate, expands on some of the figures from Metanoia: Transformation Through AIDS Archives and Activism, an archival exhibition co-curated by Cheairs that focuses on the contributions of Black women, trans women of color, and women of color HIV/AIDS activists from the past 30 years.
“The film that I have made for Day With(out) Art is really looking at the poetry, the words that women like Joann [Walker] and Katrina [Haslip], wrote while they were incarcerated and while they were going through this activist time, and really looking at how incarcerated spaces are all around us, and we don't know it,” says Cheairs. Both Walker and Haslip spent time in prison in the 1990s, where they championed AIDS education and care for incarcerated women.
Courtesy of Visual AIDS
Katherine Cheairs,Voices at the Gate, 2021. Commissioned by Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2021.
“I was interested in looking at and juxtaposing these ideas of cultural production that happens in prison, prison activism co-mingling with HIV/AIDS, and the way that these women cared for each other,” says Cheairs. “Also this kind of communication of the land, what the land is witnessing in relation to the prison and these women's lives. That's kind of my journey into this moment.”
Organizers hope that, through the work of these filmmakers and the service organizations on hand to educate, visitors will come away with more knowledge and a better understanding of the ways that AIDS touches the communities around us, outside of a strictly medical or scientific lens.
“It's helpful that we talk about HIV/AIDS in a context that's not clinical and that's not sterilized. So many people have no idea what's going on until they're directly impacted,” says Ellis. “We want to make sure that the public knows about World AIDS Day and knows about Visual AIDS, because their work is so publicly available. Folks can look at HIV/AIDS in a different light. It’s not just about the pills or the symptoms, but about how people have created these things out of pain, out of a lack of resources, and the through line is community care. When you didn't have the resources, who was there with you to help you? And when you do have the resources, who is still there to help you continue maintaining a healthy life?”
Day With(out) Art: Enduring Care takes place December 1 from 5:30-8:30 p.m. Tickets are free and available online at camstl.org. Warm drinks and light refreshments will be provided.
