Pamela Sneed (photo by Robert Giard)




In February 2015, Visual AIDS hosted AIDS & Its Metaphors in collaboration with Issue Project Room at Artists’ Space. Below, see video of Pamela Sneed reading “Funeral Diva.”

On Friday, May 29, Visual AIDS hosts Metaphors & Their Distemper, a follow-up reading event at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Artists and authors Gregg Bordowitz, Morgan Bassichis, Orlando Ferrand, Park McArthur, Stacy Szymaszek and Frederick Weston perform readings considering diagnosis, disease, coping and wellness. HIV is a primary focus, yet the theme is inclusive of all ailments and predicaments and their embodiments in writing.

We hope to see you this Friday at The Whitney at 6:30 p.m.! Event information here.





Watch additional AIDS & Its Metaphors readings by Timothy DuWhite, Jessica Whitbread, Lynne Tillman and Bordowitz here.

AIDS & Its Metaphors was produced in conjunction with the inaugural publication of Visual AIDS’s Duets series, “Stephen Andrews & Gregg Bordowitz in Conversation” (2014), which features a conversation between Bordowitz and Visual AIDS artist member Stephen Andrews. Duets is a series of publications that pairs artists, activists, writers and thinkers in dialogues about their creative practices and current social issues around HIV/AIDS. In the first publication of the series, Bordowitz speaks to longtime friend Andrews about painting, poetry, cosmology, and survival. Tillman writes the publication’s foreword. Further information on the publication can be found here.

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, performer, writer and actress whose work has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Source, Time Out, Bomb, Next, MetroSource, Blue, VIBE, HX, and on the cover of New York magazine. “A six-foot-three-inch-tall black woman with a shaved head, a big smile, and a wily sense of humor, Sneed began making a name for herself in New York in the early nineties as a writer at poetry slams and other performance-art venues while teaching at Hetrick-Martin, an organization for gay, lesbian, and transgendered youth. There and elsewhere, Sneed gave voice to the fraction of the city’s population suffering from AIDS, poverty, and bias-related crimes.” --Hilton Als, The New Yorker