Newsmakers: Visual AIDS Executive Director Kyle Croft Reflects on 35 Years of ‘Day Without Art’

Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a new ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.

In the late 1980s, a global activist movement rose in response to the AIDS epidemic, which devastated the queer community and saw a slow government response that cost thousands of lives. At the time, a group of art world professionals founded Visual AIDS to create an art world–specific response to the crisis. The organization is now best known for its Archive and Artist Registry, which aims to “collect, describe, preserve, and provide access to the personal papers, audiovisual materials, publications, and ephemera created, dealing with, or collected by HIV-positive artists” both living and deceased, according to its website.

But Visual AIDS’s earliest program to make headlines was “Day Without Art,” a project which imagined a reality when so many artists have passed from AIDS-related complications that there is no more art being made. When Day Without Art was launched in 1989, that felt like a real possibility. Over the past 35 years, the event, celebrated each December 1 on World AIDS Day, has gone through several transformations. Since 2014, Visual AIDS has commissioned a cohort of artists to create a new video work as a response to the event. Past commissioned artists include Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Tourmaline, Thomas Allen Harris, Kia LaBeija, Clifford Prince King, Mykki Blanco, and Viva Ruiz. This year’s edition, titled “Red Reminds Me…,” features seven videos that look at the legacy of the color red as it relates to HIV awareness. (Watch a trailer here.)

To learn more about the legacy of Day Without Art, ARTnews spoke with Visual AIDS executive director Kyle Croft at the organization’s offices in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.

ARTnews: Can you briefly tell us a about the history of Visual AIDS and how Day Without Art got started?

Kyle Croft: I did my master’s thesis on the history of Visual AIDS and Day Without Art, so it’s a question I’ve thought about a lot. Visual AIDS was started in 1988 by four people, each with a degree of power and influence in the art world: William Olander, a curator at the New Museum; Thomas Sokolowski, who was director at the Grey Art Gallery; Gary Garrels, who was then a programs manager at Dia; and Robert Akins, who was a writer, writing a lot for the Village Voice. It was like a professional group, and they brought together their friends and colleagues in the art world. The first meeting was around 30 people, with representatives from every major museum and larger alternative spaces. ACT UP [the famed grassroots activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power] had started the year before, [Gay Men’s Health Crisis] had been around for years. People were doing things about AIDS, but the founders were thinking through how can we leverage our power and resources in the art world? What can we do as arts professionals to contribute to this? 1988 is pretty far into the epidemic, on the one hand, but in terms of the activist response, it’s pretty early. It’s the beginning of this moment where activists are switching from [the question of] how do we organize and take care of each other to how do we burn it down and put the blame on the government and the media for not paying attention.

At one point [Visual AIDS] were publicists for the epidemic, putting out press releases for AIDS-related programming at their spaces to name that all this is happening. But the media didn’t think that was a story. So, ideas started to generate, particularly from members who had been involved in the Art Workers Coalition or Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America, to do a dramatic action that would be a new story. Artist and critic John Perreault brought up that in the ’70s there was a moratorium in which museums shut their doors for a day. He suggested doing that and calling it Day Without Art, but some institutional members said museums likely wouldn’t close for a day. It became a compromise, where the name stuck and a lot of galleries and alternative spaces closed their doors for the day, but any form of participation was welcomed. It worked in terms of generating media attention. The thing I like to point to the most is that World AIDS Day [then called AIDS Awareness Day] started in 1988, and Day Without Art started in 1989 timed to be part of that day. But if you look at the New York Times archive, the first AIDS Awareness Day is only mentioned in passing in another story about AIDS, not on the front page. The next year, for Day Without Art, there are three consecutive stories about it in the New York Times, coverage from CNN and network news stations. Part of it was PR savvy, giving visuals for these TV news segment, showing a museum with an artwork covered or a performance that’s happening. It was providing a different way to tell a story about AIDS at a moment when coverage focused on how thousands of people are dying through stereotypes and statistics.

And how was HIV/AIDS discussed in the art world at the time?

There were different layers and levels. On the one hand, there is a very big discourse and debate around what activist art looks like, a polemic within a segment of the art world that’s pushing people away from what they called sentimental practices, like Ross Bleckner whose paintings have like funeral vases in them because people are dying of AIDS versus an artwork like Silence=Death’s AIDSGATE poster of Ronald Reagan. But then in terms of the institutions that were convinced to do Day Without Art, museums weren’t embracing artwork about queer sexuality, showing artists who were explicitly queer, or talking about AIDS. There’s a whole queer art scene and community bubbling up at that time, but institutionally, it was much colder toward those practices. But you couldn’t not acknowledge that people were dying in large numbers. Part of what Day Without Art did is give people a container and a language to talk about that loss that was happening.

What did the programming for that first Day Without Art look like?

It was an open prompt. In SoHo, all the galleries were closed. In New York, the Guggenheim, which was closed for installation that day anyway, draped a huge black cloth on the facade of its building. The Whitney, I believe, gave out a postcard by Gran Fury. The Public Art Fund did posters by General Idea in the subway. David Wojnarowicz did a reading at MoMA.There was a video anthology that John Greyson and some other video artists put together called Video against AIDS that several museums could loop.

How has Day Without Art evolved since then?

There was a big transformation at Visual AIDS in the ’90s. Part of it was about starting the archive. The organization shifted from what was an urgent triage—calling for government action—toward uplifting the legacies of folks who had passed away and taking care of this community over a long period of time. And then there was moment when people didn’t really want to talk about AIDS generally or in the art world. I remember Nelson Santos, a former executive director of Visual AIDS, telling me that he would see a Keith Haring work at a museum and the wall text would make no mention of AIDS. There was an active erasure. Day Without Art never ended, but there was a moment where Visual AIDS didn’t have the resources to coordinate it anymore. In its heyday, it would do a press release naming the participating museums and create a poster each year and mail it to those museums.

Then, around 2012, documentaries about AIDS started coming out, what historian Ted Kerr has called the “AIDS crisis revisitation.” And especially now, there’s way more interest in that history. There’s an appetite for it. Museums like the Whitney and MoMA has dedicated space to it in their permanent collection galleries. People are ready to incorporate AIDS into the history of American art in a way that they weren’t previously. Part of how Visual AIDS has responded now that we’re not the only people talking about AIDS is by continuing to take a leading role in shaping the discourse. A big part of that is by reminding people that AIDS is not over. There is a lot of distance from the activism and the types of demands that were being made by activists in the ’80s, but there’s a whole slew of other issues that continue today.  AIDS intersects with housing justice, racial justice, economic justice, reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, and securing rights for trans folks. It remains very live. The work that we do, by commissioning videos, has shifted toward working with living artists who are making work about what HIV/AIDS looks like for them in a global context.

Can you talk about the Day Without Art commissions?

2014 was the first year that we commissioned artists, but 2010 to 2013 was kind of the rebirth of Day Without Art, where we distributed artists’ videos like Ira Sachs’s Last Address, Jim Hodges’s film Untitled, and Jim Hubbard’s United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. Museums took those as screening programs. The first couple of years of commissioning was a hybrid of documentary video about the past and artist responses to the present. It’s developed to privileging the present moment; a lot of times that still involves archival footage or thinking about history.

Now, we do an open call to artists that is a low barrier: a 250-word proposal and some work samples. Anyone in the world can participate. By working with artists more internationally, we provide opportunities and support to artists and those places in a way that resonates, especially since the stakes and politics of AIDS are different in Chile, Brazil, Colombia, or South Korea. We’re engaging people from those whose trajectory looks like a traditional contemporary artist (with MFAs) to people who work in AIDS organizations to activists who may have very little prior experience in an art context. Each year, we have a theme and a jury who choose five to seven artists. We put the videos on our website for free and have a network of between 100 and 150 institutions who screen the videos each year. The theme this year keys into emotion and thinking about the types of emotional associations that are typically related to HIV, like grief and mourning, or maybe anger and political rage. We’re trying to honor those and trying to show a much broader spectrum of what it feels like to live with HIV today. To me, that’s a direct lineage back to the type of AIDS activist video that was being created in the ’80s and ’90s by artists like Gregg Bordowitz or Cheryl Dunye, who were working as video artists but were making video because it would reach a lot of people outside of the art world.

Now that we do see so much institutional attention toward AIDS histories, I think our role has become supporting a type of artistic production that is fighting this narrative of resolution or closure around AIDS. Part of the revisitation moment is this feeling of distance that people are ready to look back at it because it doesn’t feel like it’s still happening in the same way. The archive has come to the fore in recent years—and I think it will continue to—because of the appetite to create a canon of ’80s and ’90s AIDS art history. Visual AIDS has a role in shaping that history and making sure that it’s not replicating the exclusions and erasures that so much of art history does. The AIDS movement has an incredible history that is ongoing, and we function to complete the circuit between the past and the present and to be continually looking into the archive for inspiration to understand what’s happening now.

Our priority for this year’s Day Without Art commissions was to push against some of the expectations and tropes for what media or art about HIV/AIDS looks like or feels like to present a more full or complex picture. Part of the idea of AIDS that is not over is that AIDS doesn’t have to always be this dramatic, tragic note. There can be something mundane or quotidian about that experience. I think the screening events can function as a space where people can come together and talk about HIV and AIDS in this context that’s not a support group or a doctor’s office. That’s actually quite rare.