The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art is pleased to announce their upcoming exhibition, A Deeper Dive, co-curated by Jonathan David Katz and Andrew Barron. This thought-provoking and compelling exhibition visually explores the impact of HIV/AIDS on American art from a diverse mix of LGBTQ artists, as well as their friends and allies. The show, which will include painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installation, aims to demonstrate how artists with various gender and sexual identities responded to the HIV/AIDS epidemic through the process of art making. A Deeper Dive will coincide with Art AIDS America, which will travel to the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and will be on view from July 13 – September 25, 2016.

A Deeper Dive will feature work by nine distinctive artists: Lawrence Broze, Brian Buczak, John Dugdale, Jimmy DeSana, Karen Finley, Deborah Kass, Glenn Ligon, Ann P. Meredith, and Anthony Viti. Each artist represented expresses powerful themes of emotion, intimacy, death, life and so much more! Here are a few highlights of the work from these captivating artists that are part of A Deeper Dive.

At the age of 33, John Dugdale soon lost most of his sight due to CMV-retinitis (an HIV/AID related illness) and shortly thereafter, began the practice of photographing blindly whereby he contemplates images in his mind’s eye and, with the help of friends and studio assistants, brings those visions to life using 19th century photographic techniques. In the works by Jimmy DeSana, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1990, he attempts to depict a kind of bodily intimacy that is not predicated on intercourse.

Through black and white photographs of women situated in their homes and surrounding neighborhoods, Ann P. Meredith individualizes and gives voice to those who were occluded from the mainstream media’s depiction of HIV/AIDS. Text-based works by Glenn Ligon such as his My Fear Is Your Fear from 1995 extend beyond an identity-based politics and point toward the underlying emotion that binds differently affected communities by involving both artist and viewer. This image is as powerful today in its message as it was when created in 1995. Anthony Viti early works are inspired by Marsden Hartley and express abstract body images. Also featured is one of the first video documentaries on AIDS created during the 1980s by Lawrence Brose.

Deborah Kass, in her text-based series Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times and No Kidding, celebrates tenacity and survival, and appropriates canonical artists and styles and gives them a renewed social and political relevance through her play between text and image. Karen Finley’s Ribbon Gate calls upon viewers to tie a piece of colored ribbon to a metal gate as a means of commemorating someone they’ve lost to AIDS. And, Brian Buczak, another artist whose life was tragically cut short by AIDS, painterly abstractions transform into representations of the body’s interiority, or connote death.

“AIDS has doubly deprived us; of the many talented artists who died too young, and of the opportunity to see the AIDS work of many who survived, because widespread censorship and art world cowardice has made AIDS almost invisible. But in this diverse group of major artists, we see AIDS not a tragic tangent to American art, but as a motor for some of its highest achievements,” as expressed by Jonathan David Katz, Co-curator.