In recognition of the 2024 Day With(out) Art, the Yale LGBTQ Center, the Yale University Art Gallery, and Public Humanities at Yale are proud to partner with Visual AIDS to present Red Reminds Me …, a screening of seven short videos reflecting the emotional spectrum of living with HIV today. The program features newly commissioned videos by Gian Cruz; Milko Delgado; Imani Harrington; David Oscar Harvey; Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar; Nixie; and Vasilios Papapitsios. The screening will be preceded by a welcome from Jackie Gagne, Program Administrator for Yale Public Humanities, and an introduction by Cierra Michele Peters, M.F.A. candidate.

Through the red ribbon and other visuals, HIV and AIDS has long been associated with the color red and its connotations—blood, pain, tragedy, and anger. Red Reminds Me … invites viewers to consider a complex range of images and feelings surrounding HIV, from eroticism and intimacy to mothering and kinship, luck and chance, memory and haunting. The commissioned artists deploy parody, melodrama, theater, irony, and horror to build a new vocabulary for representing HIV today.

The first Day With(out) Art was organized by Visual AIDS in 1989. Coinciding with World AIDS Day on December 1, it was a call for action and mourning that sought to draw attention to the devastating impact of AIDS on the arts community. Hundreds of museums and galleries participated in the one-day moratorium on exhibitions, shrouding works of art and replacing them with information about the virus. 

Thousands of arts institutions and organizations around the world continue to unite on or about December 1 to demonstrate the power of art to raise awareness about the AIDS crisis, which is far from over. Since the onset of the epidemic in the early 1980s, 79.3 million people worldwide have been infected and 36.3 million have died of AIDS. In 2020, 37.7 million people were living with HIV and 1.5 million had been newly infected.

For more information about the project, visit visualaids.org/projects/day-without-art.

Generously sponsored by the Yale LGBTQ Center, the Yale University Art Gallery’s Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund, and Public Humanities at Yale.