To the best of my understanding, no other contemporary health crisis has had a cultural impact comparable to that brought about by the rise of AIDS.\u00a0 From its broad recognition in the 1980s and onward, it took ferocious bites out of western civilization\u2019s creative community.<\/p>\n
In the late \u201880s and early \u201890s, I watched as friends became desperately ill, both physically and mentally, and passed with all-too-quick & complicated deaths well before their time.\u00a0 In 1991 I sat around a table with other volunteers, cutting & looping strips of red ribbon and attaching them to miniature safety pins for distribution.\u00a0 This was the dawn of Visual AIDS and \u201cDay Without Art\u201d \u2013 December 1st<\/sup> \u2013 now World AIDS Day.\u00a0 A small but growing band of us wore our pinned ribbons on our jackets as we rode New York\u2019s subways and maneuvered its crowded sidewalks.\u00a0 I remember once passing by a stranger – each of us ribbon bearing.\u00a0 We smiled and he piped \u201cAIDS Awareness!\u201d \u2013 touching on the shared responsibility as we moved within our separate lives.<\/p>\n One aspect of the crisis that was quickly recognized in the collective awareness was the high toll it claimed within the arts, along with other creative disciplines.\u00a0 It registered that this time in our culture would suffer from the voices cut off, even while it gained from the passion of those who were churning out art at notable speed \u2013 eager to get their points across in numbered days.\u00a0 (Think:\u00a0 Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Felix Gonz\u00e1lez-Torres\u2026.)<\/p>\n For all of this needless loss of life, we can be thankful that so many have cried out at the unjustness, at the scandal of non-reaction or counter-reaction by our elected officials, and have made well-sure that the dead were not sacrificed in vain.\u00a0 We can be proud that decades later efforts continue to eradicate AIDS, and to create awareness of those suffering \u2013 even when they are a world away and many degrees separated from our immediate community.\u00a0 No matter who or where on the planet, those who are infected should never be among the forgotten.\u00a0 And the cultural community should never stop drawing attention to the extremity of the loss.<\/p>\n Across the years I have seen so many events and actions born within the arts for the purpose of AIDS activism, education and awareness.\u00a0 Creation of a collective log of these cultural stands is, for me, personally, long overdue.\u00a0 I was inspired to create the blue sunglasses project<\/a> as a way to carry on the memory of a group of artist friends who passed in the early \u201890s. \u00a0And it is that ongoing project which has sparked this documentation.<\/p>\n If you have any news of an event or action that would be appropriate for record here, please do send it my way.<\/p>\n Yours faithfully, To the best of my understanding, no other contemporary health crisis has had a cultural impact comparable to that brought about by the rise of AIDS.\u00a0 From its broad recognition in the 1980s and onward, it took ferocious bites out of western civilization\u2019s creative community. In the late \u201880s and early \u201890s, I watched as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-32","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","three-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bluesunglassesproject.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bluesunglassesproject.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bluesunglassesproject.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bluesunglassesproject.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bluesunglassesproject.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.bluesunglassesproject.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":200,"href":"https:\/\/www.bluesunglassesproject.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32\/revisions\/200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bluesunglassesproject.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nmargaret schnipper<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"