Visual AIDS and the AIDS Ribbon
When and how did you get involved with AIDS awareness?
I had gone through thirteen years of illness with my brother, Charley, when AIDS reared its awful head about the time he died in 1983. I then began to see so many good friends get sick and face death the way I had seen my brother have to go through it. Yet, there was a monumental difference. My straight brother had the full attention of Vanderbilt Hospital and was accorded great respect by the doctors for his difficult journey. But with AIDS other young men, most of whom were gay, were often disparaged or ignored. In response, I joined Visual AIDS, a group of artists in New York City who gathered at the Museum of Modern Art a few times a month to figure out ways to make AIDS more visible to the world through art.
A Day Without Art was a project that was already established by the time I joined Visual AIDS. By agreeing to cover up major works of art for one day in museums throughout the country, the art establishment showed the world the symbolic effect that losses from AIDS had caused the world of culture.
At the same time, I had been thinking to myself that AIDS was hitting everyone, not just artists, and the particular kind of elitism in the museums bugged me, so at one meeting I raised my hand and said we ought to do something that showed the effect on the whole populace and I continued with the second thought in my head, “Why don’t we get the city to dim its lights for a moment? It would be like bowing its head.”
The group responded that it was a fantastic idea and said, “Why don’t you organize it?”
I remember thinking “mother of god, what have I just gotten myself into?”
Six very busy months later, on World AIDS Day, December 1, 1990, the first Night Without Light took place, when all of Manhattan’s famous illuminated buildings, monuments, and bridges turned their lights off for fifteen minutes to demonstrate the deadening effect the disease had on the whole city. After that year, a dozen more American cities followed, and eventually, even the Bush Senior White House did it.
The Red Ribbon was in some ways a natural extension of the same idea. In 1990, the topic of AIDS stilled carried the weight of shame, fear, even disgust. People didn’t feel comfortable talking about it and that was dangerous. Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration was taking its time to approve new drugs while thousands of people, who could be saved, were dying. So Visual AIDS pooled together yet another circle of artists, seven this time, including me, with the mission to design a device that forced people to acknowledge AIDS and to talk about it.
Thus was born the Red Ribbon Project. The key to its phenomenal launch was actor Jeremy Irons. He was the master of ceremony for the Emmy Awards that very week, and we asked him to wear it on the nationally televised show and to break from his script to explain why he was wearing it. He agreed to do it and he did it powerfully, I think to the shock of the show’s producers. The very next day, the ribbon began showing up on the sidewalk in New York. Within a year, an American stamp was made to honor it.
The Red Ribbon, the grandmother of all those other colored ribbons, seems trivial now, over twenty years later and next to the activism of groups like ACT UP and Visual AIDS, but when it was first devised, it was pretty radical and it left a huge impact on how AIDS was seen in the Western World and helped make AIDS undeniable.
Back
I had gone through thirteen years of illness with my brother, Charley, when AIDS reared its awful head about the time he died in 1983. I then began to see so many good friends get sick and face death the way I had seen my brother have to go through it. Yet, there was a monumental difference. My straight brother had the full attention of Vanderbilt Hospital and was accorded great respect by the doctors for his difficult journey. But with AIDS other young men, most of whom were gay, were often disparaged or ignored. In response, I joined Visual AIDS, a group of artists in New York City who gathered at the Museum of Modern Art a few times a month to figure out ways to make AIDS more visible to the world through art.
A Day Without Art was a project that was already established by the time I joined Visual AIDS. By agreeing to cover up major works of art for one day in museums throughout the country, the art establishment showed the world the symbolic effect that losses from AIDS had caused the world of culture.
At the same time, I had been thinking to myself that AIDS was hitting everyone, not just artists, and the particular kind of elitism in the museums bugged me, so at one meeting I raised my hand and said we ought to do something that showed the effect on the whole populace and I continued with the second thought in my head, “Why don’t we get the city to dim its lights for a moment? It would be like bowing its head.”
The group responded that it was a fantastic idea and said, “Why don’t you organize it?”
I remember thinking “mother of god, what have I just gotten myself into?”
Six very busy months later, on World AIDS Day, December 1, 1990, the first Night Without Light took place, when all of Manhattan’s famous illuminated buildings, monuments, and bridges turned their lights off for fifteen minutes to demonstrate the deadening effect the disease had on the whole city. After that year, a dozen more American cities followed, and eventually, even the Bush Senior White House did it.
The Red Ribbon was in some ways a natural extension of the same idea. In 1990, the topic of AIDS stilled carried the weight of shame, fear, even disgust. People didn’t feel comfortable talking about it and that was dangerous. Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration was taking its time to approve new drugs while thousands of people, who could be saved, were dying. So Visual AIDS pooled together yet another circle of artists, seven this time, including me, with the mission to design a device that forced people to acknowledge AIDS and to talk about it.
Thus was born the Red Ribbon Project. The key to its phenomenal launch was actor Jeremy Irons. He was the master of ceremony for the Emmy Awards that very week, and we asked him to wear it on the nationally televised show and to break from his script to explain why he was wearing it. He agreed to do it and he did it powerfully, I think to the shock of the show’s producers. The very next day, the ribbon began showing up on the sidewalk in New York. Within a year, an American stamp was made to honor it.
The Red Ribbon, the grandmother of all those other colored ribbons, seems trivial now, over twenty years later and next to the activism of groups like ACT UP and Visual AIDS, but when it was first devised, it was pretty radical and it left a huge impact on how AIDS was seen in the Western World and helped make AIDS undeniable.
