On December 1, 1992, a mock funeral procession headed north on Michigan Avenue past the Art Institute. A bagpipe player led the cortege, followed by wreath bearers and a horse-drawn carriage. The procession was the idea of performance artist Iris Moore, and it was just one of many local events staged that year to mark A Day Without Art, the international art community’s annual observance of World AIDS Day. The School of the Art Institute even sponsored a two-day symposium examining the cultural representation of people with AIDS or HIV.
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A Day Without Art was started in 1989 by Visual AIDS, a New York-based collective of artists and art professionals. Participants paid symbolic tribute to victims of the disease with gallery closings, the veiling or removal of artworks, the distribution of red ribbons, and candlelight vigils.
Gallery owner Catherine Edelman, who helped organize observations here in 1989 and ’90, recalls how difficult it was to galvanize interest in the beginning. Response was “poor,” she says, with only “seven or eight” River North galleries participating. “People had the option of closing, or doing something that would disrupt the enjoyment of artwork. Some people would’ve rather written checks. It wasn’t money we wanted, but action. It was frustrating because people didn’t grasp the concept, and how it could have an effect on the general public.”
After changing its name to Art AIDS Chicago in 1993 and hiring a paid intern to coordinate events, the Chicago committee began to lose its sense of purpose. The city started coordinating World AIDS Day activities four years ago. “[The committee] was a very small volunteer group, with minimal funding, and they took on what they could do at the time,” says Carolyn Aguila, a former committee member who handles public programming at the Chicago Cultural Center. “It became a big job, and they didn’t have the money, resources, or time to do it. They didn’t want to do major fund-raising and take funds away from AIDS service organizations.”
The Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Museum of Puerto Rican History and Culture will join Vida/SIDA–an educational, support, and alternative-treatment project attending to the AIDS crisis in the Latino community–in sponsoring a candlelight vigil and procession starting at 4:30 PM under the Puerto Rican flag sculpture at Division and Artesian. The walk continues to the museum at 1457 N. California, where there will be a reception beginning at 6 for an exhibit of work by artists living with or affected by HIV or AIDS.
