LibGuides: AIDS, Posters &amp; Stories of Public Health: A People’s History of a Pandemic (Traveling Exhibit): Drexel University Library Resources

HIV/AIDS Resources in the Drexel Libraries Catalog

After Silence: A history of AIDS Through its Images by Avram Finkelstein
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9780520295148
Publication Date: 2017-11-07
Early in the 1980s AIDS epidemic, six gay activists created one of the most iconic and lasting images that would come to symbolize a movement: a protest poster of a pink triangle with the words "Silence = Death." The graphic and the slogan still resonate today, often used--and misused--to brand the entire movement. Cofounder of the collective Silence = Death and member of the art collective Gran Fury, Avram Finkelstein tells the story of how his work and other protest artwork associated with the early years of the pandemic were created. In writing about art and AIDS activism, the formation of collectives, and the political process, Finkelstein reveals a different side of the traditional HIV/AIDS history, told twenty-five years later, and offers a creative toolbox for those who want to learn how to save lives through activism and making art.
And the Band Played On: Politics, people and the AIDS epidemic by Randy Shilts
Call Number: Temporary Health Sciences Collection; WC 503.7 S556a 1987
ISBN: 9780312009946
Publication Date: 1987-09-01
The book chronicles the discovery and spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) with a special emphasis on government indifference and political infighting—specifically in the United States—to what was then perceived as a specifically gay disease. Shilts's premise is that AIDS was allowed to happen: while the disease is caused by a biological agent, incompetence and apathy toward those initially affected allowed its spread to become much worse.
Art AIDS America by Jonathan David Katz; Rock Hushka
Call Number: Stacks; N8217.A5 K38x 2015
ISBN: 9780295994949
Publication Date: 2015-01-01
Art AIDS America is the first comprehensive overview and reconsideration of 30 years of art made in response to the AIDS epidemic in the United States. This book foregrounds the role of HIV/AIDS in shifting the development of American art away from the cool conceptual foundations of postmodernism and toward a new, more insistently political and autobiographical voice. Art AIDS America surveys more than 100 works of American art from the early 1980s to the present, reintroducing and exploring the whole spectrum of artistic responses to HIV/AIDS, from in-your-face activism to quiet elegy.
It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic by Jack Lowery
Call Number: Interlibrary Loan
ISBN: 9781645036586
Publication Date: 2022-04-05
Shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize The story of art collective Gran Fury--which fought back during the AIDS crisis through direct action and community-made propaganda--offers lessons in love and grief. In the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was annihilating queer people, intravenous drug users, and communities of color in America, and disinformation about the disease ran rampant. Out of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an art collective that called itself Gran Fury formed to campaign against corporate greed, government inaction, stigma, and public indifference to the epidemic. Writer Jack Lowery examines Gran Fury's art and activism from iconic images like the "Kissing Doesn't Kill" poster to the act of dropping piles of fake bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Lowery offers a complex, moving portrait of a collective and its members, who built essential solidarities with each other and whose lives evidenced the profound trauma of enduring the AIDS crisis. Gran Fury and ACT UP's strategies are still used frequently by the activists leading contemporary movements. In an era when structural violence and the devastation of COVID-19 continue to target the most vulnerable, this belief in the power of public art and action persists.
Let the record show: A political history of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 by Sarah Schulman
Call Number: New Book Display; RA644.A25 S3633 2021
ISBN: 9780374185138
Publication Date: 2021-05-18
Winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary LGBTQ Nonfiction Award and the 2022 NLGJA Excellence in Book Writing Award. Twenty years in the making, Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show is the most comprehensive political history ever assembled of ACT UP and American AIDS activism In just six years, ACT UP, New York, a broad and unlikely coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, changed the world. Armed with rancor, desperation, intelligence, and creativity, it took on the AIDS crisis with an indefatigable, ingenious, and multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. Based on more than two hundred interviews with ACT UP members and rich with lessons for today's activists, Let the Record Show is a revelatory exploration--and long-overdue reassessment--of the coalition's inner workings, conflicts, achievements, and ultimate fracture.
Moving politics: Emotion and act up's fight against AIDS by Deborah B. Gould
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9780226305301
Publication Date: 2009-12-15
In the late 1980s, after a decade spent engaged in more routine interest-group politics, thousands of lesbians and gay men responded to the AIDS crisis by defiantly and dramatically taking to the streets. But by the early 1990s, the organization they founded, ACT UP, was no more--even as the AIDS epidemic raged on. Weaving together interviews with activists, extensive research, and reflections on the author's time as a member of the organization, Moving Politics is the first book to chronicle the rise and fall of ACT UP, highlighting a key factor in its trajectory: emotion. Surprisingly overlooked by many scholars of social movements, emotion, Gould argues, plays a fundamental role in political activism.
Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS by Marika Cifor
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9781452963549
Publication Date: 2022-06-07
Delves deep into the archives that keep the history and work of AIDS activism alive Serving as a vital supplement to the existing scholarship on AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s, ViralCultures is the first book to critically examine the archives that have helped preserve and create the legacy of those radical activities. Marika Cifor charts the efforts activists, archivists, and curators have made to document the work of AIDS activism in the United States and the infrastructure developed to maintain it, safeguarding the material for future generations to remember these social movements and to revitalize the epidemic's past in order to remake the present and future of AIDS. Drawing on large institutional archives such as the New York Public Library, as well as those developed by small, community-based organizations, this work of archival ethnography details how contemporary activists, artists, and curators use these records to build on the cultural legacy of AIDS activism to challenge the conditions of injustice that continue to undergird current AIDS crises.

Acting Up against AIDS: The (very) graphic arts in a moment of crisis.
Reed, T. V. (2019). Acting Up against AIDS: The (very) graphic arts in a moment of crisis. In The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present (pp. 197–238). University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvb1hrcf.10
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This chapter explores one of the most dynamic and successful social movement groups of the late 1980s and 1990s, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP. One key argument of this book—that all movement politics involves a degree ofcultural politics—owes much to recent activist groups like ACT UP, which have made such an insight difficult to ignore. ACT UP, as much as any movement yet invented, has made self-conscious cultural struggle part of its core work.
AIDS and Activism
Megan Hicks. (2013). AIDS and Activism. Health and History, 15(2), 112–118. https://doi.org/10.5401/healthhist.15.2.0112
AIDS POSTERS: A COMMUNITY TOOL USED TO SAVE LIVES
Circulating Now welcomes guest blogger Theodore (ted) Kerr to discuss his research in the AIDS poster collection at the National Library of Medicine and his experience guest curating NLM’s upcoming exhibition AIDS, Posters, and Stories of Public Health: A People’s History of a Pandemic.
Assessing Arts for Social Change
Berman, K. S. (2017). Assessing Arts for Social Change. In Finding Voice: A Visual Arts Approach to Engaging Social Change (pp. 135–176). University of Michigan Press.
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How can we assess or measure change? Textbook methodologies often presume that there are rational and objective ways of analyzing data for research purposes. This chapter explores ways to assess complex change using visual arts methods and practice, as well as to present it in forms that can satisfy the multiple stakeholders of academia, donors, and community.
Can arts advocacy become a social movement?: A case study of the AIDS movement and the use of the arts to convey change
Gearhart, L. E., & Goodman, J. (2016). Can arts advocacy become a social movement? : A case study of the AIDS movement and the use of the arts to convey change. (Drexel University) ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
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"As arts advocates, we are plagued with the never-ending task of communicating the importance of the arts, with the primary goal of fostering public support and creating sustainability for our sector. Over the past two decades, advocates have created a number of arguments to address this need for support, such as economic, intrinsic and instrumental. But what is lacking in each of these tactics is the use of one key element: the arts themselves. In embarking on this study, I set out to review all the various communication tactics utilized by the arts sector in order to understand why, as advocates, we often fail to utilize the actual arts to advocate for greater public support and societal change. In order to gain an understanding of how art has been utilized as a tactic by other social issues, I proceeded to identify and research a social movement that was effective in employing art to create public support. In choosing the AIDS epidemic for this case study, I set out to investigate specific examples of art that were created at the inception of the movement and continuously employed. Through the examination of the AIDS Quilt and ACT UP, what I ultimately discovered was that art was an employable tactic for communication of a social issue but was not the only strategy. Both examples enabled the AIDS movement to create lasting social change through the use of diverse advocacy tactics, including art. In focusing on the art of each example, then, I aim to make the argument that the sector must utilize art and a unified message alongside other strategies to communicate the value of and need for lasting public support."
Collaborative AIDS Art and Activism: Content for Multicultural Art Education
Wyrick, M. (1993). Collaborative AIDS Art and Activism: Content for Multicultural Art Education. Visual Arts Research, 19(2), 44–54.
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This study is an analysis of and advocacy for visual artists whose collaborative activism targets the causes of the devastating effects of the AIDS epidemic, particularly its effects on minority groups in the U.S. I examine the relevance of AIDS activism to a multicultural curriculum for children, showing how art produced by AIDS artists/activists can be a source of multicultural content. This study shows how such content goes beyond appropriation of various cultures' visual style to using art for raising critical and activist awareness. Analysis of visual art production also connects contemporary artmaking with educational resources focusing on African-American and Hispanic minorities. Discussion of applications in a preservice methods course shows how educators can and should meet their responsibilities to their students in confronting the AIDS crisis and related social problems of minority groups.
HIV/AIDS Histories: Community Service Organizations and the Direct-Action AIDS Movement in Documentary Film
McKay, R. A. (2014). HIV/AIDS Histories: Community Service Organizations and the Direct-Action AIDS Movement in Documentary Film. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 88(4), 734–737. https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2014.0064
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With releases timed to accompany the thirtieth anniversary of the recognition in 1981 of a syndrome that would become known as AIDS, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the formation of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)-the best-known direct-action AIDS protest group-three new documentary films offer compelling and contrasting accounts of the worst years of the American HIV/ AIDS epidemic. While the film's coverage includes candlelight marches, the rise of a more confrontational AIDS activism, and the eventual development of effective antiretroviral therapy, the film's main contribution is its depiction of a caring and cooperative community of lesbians and gay men working together in response to the epidemic.
A pedagogy of activist art: Exploring the educational significance of creating art for social justice
Dewhurst, M. C. (2009). A pedagogy of activist art: Exploring the educational significance of creating art for social justice. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
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In classrooms, community centers, museums, and alternative learning sites across the country, large numbers of young people are creating works of art—from murals and plays, to photographs and spoken word poetry—that question, challenge, and at times, impact existing conditions of inequality and injustice. Despite the popularity of such youth arts organizations, only recently have education researchers begun to examine the unique learning and teaching that occurs when arts are applied towards social justice aims. Through a qualitative study of youth perspectives on and observed experiences in a small activist art class, this study analyzes the educational value of activist art making. The findings presented here highlight three key processes that are fundamental to the development of a work of activist art: connecting, questioning, and translating. An analysis of the nature of these processes both in practice, and as they are characterized in educational scholarship, suggests that the practice of making activist art is a rich space for learning and teaching. An emerging pedagogy of activist art offers a model for understanding and facilitating activist art making as an educational practice. This theory highlights the duality of activist art making, whereby participants both direct and experience the learning and teaching required of creating artwork with social justice aims. In a field still struggling to define itself, this study provides a clear articulation of what learning and teaching actually happens when young people create activist art—an articulation drawn from both youth perspectives and researcher interpretations. Finally, this overview of the pedagogy of activist art points to a series of suggested tools for those interested in facilitating activist art programs with young people. In a political and educational landscape where youth are often silenced and ignored, the implications of a pedagogy of activist art point to the ways in which this practice may serve as an important means for empowering young people to actively engage in and affect the world around them.
Silence, Death, and the Invisible Enemy: AIDS Activism and Social Movement "Newness"
Gamson, J. (1989). Silence, Death, and the Invisible Enemy: AIDS Activism and Social Movement “Newness.” Social Problems (Berkeley, Calif.), 36(4), 351–367. https://doi.org/10.2307/800820
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Examining the dynamics and activities of the AIDS activist movement-here, through an a
participant-observation study of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in San Franci
opportunity to clarify issues on which social movements literature tends to be hazy. ACT UP
action and material targets with expressive action and cultural targets; their cultural activity
boundary-crossing and the contesting of images. They often have difficulty distinguishing the
caught both denying and affirming that AIDS is a gay disease. I argue that these actions and d
understood in the context of changed forms of domination, more and more an invisible and d
of "normalization, " with the state gradually less directly involved. This argument not only ex
lars of ACT UP's activism, but also poses challenges to theorizing on contemporary ("
Resource List: HIV/AIDS, Public Health, & Health Equity
The curated collection of resources below delves into the multifaceted narrative of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, including historical insights, public health perspectives, and personal stories.

Director: Tam Ho
Narrator: James Wentzy
Run Time: 1 hour 14 minutes

Inspired by a collection of personal notebooks, Books of James is an experimental documentary on ART, AIDS and ACTIVISM. Based on the writing, drawing, video footage and personal revelation of James Wentzy, an artist/activist in New York City, the film illustrates the 30-year timeline from the late 1970s to the present, examining the changes in the social and political landscape of America. Following James from South Dakota to New York City, the film traces his days from struggling and surviving as an artist to later becoming an AIDS video activist.

With narration provided by James himself, the film is divided into 3 periods of his life, recorded in his journals and video footage over a 30-year time span: The Personal (Notebook Entries from 1977 to 1990), The Political (The ACT UP Years), and The Postscripts.

The Battle of AmfAR (Documentary)

Director: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman
Run Time: 40 minutes

The Battle of amfAR presents the little-known story of how in the early days of the AIDS pandemic an unlikely alliance between a celebrity and a scientist helped changed the public perception of the disease and led to the search for a cure. Hollywood superstar Elizabeth Taylor and Sloan-Kettering research scientist Dr. Mathilde Krim joined forces to create greater AIDS awareness, fight government indifference and public stigma, and establish AmFAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research -- the first national organization dedicated to mobilizing the scientific community in the fight against AIDS and for a cure. The Battle of AmfAR reconstructs the history of the early years of the AIDS crisis through the twin lenses of early medical concern and the dedicated activism of these two powerful women. The film also explains some of the challenging science of the disease and the important breakthroughs in AIDS research.

How to Survive a Plague (Documentary)

Director: David France
Run Time: 1 hour 50 minutes

Faced with their own mortality, an improbable group of mostly HIV - positive young men and women broke the mold as radical warriors taking on Washington and the medical establishment. Despite having no scientific training, these self - made activists infiltrated the pharmaceutical industry and helped identify promising new drugs, moving them from experimental trials to patients in record time. How To Survive A Plague is the story of how activism and innovation turned AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable condition.

The Last One (Documentary)

Director: Nadine C. Licoste
Run Time: 1 hour 11 minutes

The Last One presents an updated history of the AIDS epidemic in America through the story of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The film traces how what at first was labeled a "gay disease" now disproportionately impacts the African American community, including women and youth. In the 1980s, as AIDS ravaged the gay community in the U.S., the AIDS Quilt was born as a tool to help promote understanding and treatment. Through the intensely personal stories of those involved with the Quilt, including founder Cleve Jones, The Last One examines how stigma, discrimination, and the lack of access to care exacerbated a disease that now infects over 1 million Americans, with nearly 50,000 new cases every year. The film follows the path of the Quilt on tour, visiting a variety of communities and people, including a high school where a young African American woman born with AIDS speaks out to fight stigma in her community.

And The Band Played On (Drama--Film)

Director: Roger Spottiswoode
Run Time: 2 hours 30 minutes

In 1981, epidemiologist Don Francis (Matthew Modine) learns of an increased rate of death among gay men in urban areas. The startling information leads him to begin investigating the outbreak, which is ultimately identified as AIDS. His journey finds mostly opposition from politicians and doctors, but several join him in his cause. As it becomes apparent that people have personal reasons to turn the other cheek, Francis persists. Meanwhile, the number of deaths continues to grow.

Philadelphia (Drama- Film)

Director: Jonathan Demme
Run Time: 2 hours 5 minutes

Fearing it would compromise his career, lawyer Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) hides his homosexuality and HIV status at a powerful Philadelphia law firm. But his secret is exposed when a colleague spots the illness's telltale lesions. Fired shortly afterwards, Beckett resolves to sue for discrimination, teaming up with Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), the only lawyer willing to help. In court, they face one of his ex-employer's top litigators, Belinda Conine (Mary Steenburgen).