The New York City-based group Visual AIDS will once again commemorate World AIDS Day with its Day With(out) Art, which since 1989 has utilized a broad range of innovative methods to highlight the disease's powerful effects on the artistic community in New York and around the world. This year, the group will be hosting December 1 screenings of Ira Sachs' new film Last Address at key locations across the globe, including El Museo de Barrio, the Grey Art Gallery at NYU, the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation, and the LGBT Community Center, all here in New York City.
Sachs's eight minute film quietly but movingly chronicles the devastating effects of AIDS by showing the actual exteriors of homes of some of the countless New York City artists lost the disease, including Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, Klaus Nomi, and Ethyl Eichelberger.
Visual AIDS was founded in 1989 by members of New York City's arts community, who, filled with grief and frustration at having lost so many of their cohorts to HIV and AIDS, sought ways to collectively use art to bring awareness of the disease to a broader American public. Day Without Art, the group's first nationwide effort, debuted on December 1 of that year, and garnered national media attention by convincing several arts institutions to shut their doors for one day, with the purpose of revealing what a world without art might indeed be like. In 1991 the group unleashed the red ribbon campaign, creating what would quickly become a global symbol in the fight against AIDS.