One Thousand Women, One Thousand Stories: Nicola Fairbrother

Thanks to Nicola’s mum for this story about one of the moving forces behind the Living Archives on Eugenics project:

http://www.onethousandwomen.ca/nicola-caroline-fairbrother/

She leaves out that Nicola swears like a trooper and wields her cell phone like it is part of her body, but I guess most everyone already knows that.

ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS, 1987–1993

EXHIBITION: ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS, 1987–1993

running until December 23, 2009; for an earlier What Sorts post on the ACT UP Oral History Project, click here

the exhibition poster below is worth downloading for both the images it contains and the schedule of events it lists.

Harvard exhibition of visual media in AIDS activism marks 20 year anniversary of the formation of ACT UP New York — Premiere of the ACT UP Oral History Project

exhibition poster pdf file

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Harvard Art Museum present ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993, an exhibition of over 70 politically-charged posters, stickers, and other visual media that emerged during a pivotal moment of AIDS activism in New York City. The exhibition chronicles New York’s AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) through an examination of compelling graphics created by various artist collectives that populated the group. The exhibition also features the premiere of the ACT UP Oral History Project, a suite of over 100 video interviews with surviving members of ACT UP New York that offer a retrospective portal on a decisive moment in the history of the gay rights movement, 20th-century visual art, our nation’s discussion of universal healthcare, and the continuing HIV/AIDS epidemic. The exhibition opens just over 20 years after the formation of ACT UP and also marks the 40 year anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the defining event that marked the start of the gay rights movement in the United States. The exhibition ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993 provides an opportunity to reinvigorate a debate around the realities of HIV/AIDS today, and about the links between visual art, political activism, health, and human rights.

ACT UP’s demonstrations in the late 1980s and early 1990s reflected the group’s outrage against a governing establishment that ignored HIV/AIDS as a national health crisis; that failed to secure funding for medical research, treatment, and education; that profited from inflated costs for therapeutic drugs; and that perpetuated homophobic misrepresentations of HIV and AIDS.

ACTUP Oral History Project

 

silence = death

This week we had a real treat in Edmonton in having Sarah Schulman from the ACTUP Oral History Project around for the week. ACTUP–the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power–was the leading activist organization in the US formed to fight on behalf of those with a then-mysterious “gay disease” in the early 1980s that came to be known as AIDS. The Oral History Project has been underway for over five years, and is centred on almost 100 video interviews, one with each living member of ACTUP, New York. The interviews, which run up to 4 hours, can be accessed via the OHP website. There you can view about 5 minutes of streaming video of the 70 or so interviews that have been posted there, and download FULL transcripts of all of these in pdf.