BECAUSE WE ARE

BECAUSE WE ARE
opens Saturday, June 19, 2010 from 7 - 10pm.

This exhibition presents the work of 10 distinguished artists who are dealing with issues regarding Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transexual civil rights. Fundamental concerns include gay marriage, the AIDS crisis, religious and legislative persecution, hate crimes and gay sexuality.

Gay marriage is a controversial issue and a subject that Brooklyn based artist Patricia Cronin personally confronts through her well-known classically sculpted funerary monument Memorial To A Marriage. She also presents her intimate series of erotic watercolors. The AIDS crisis devastated the gay community beginning in the 1980s. Outspoken artists affected by this disease explored its effects in their artwork. One of the most influential figures of this time was New York based artists David Wojnarowicz. His “Untitled” (One Day this Kid...) reveals an intimate narrative that shows how devastating this disease is. More recently, Daniel Goldstein’s Medicine Man approaches AIDS on conceptual level. The suspended human- shaped sculpture consists of steel wire threaded with nearly 300 donated empty HIV medication bottles and 139 syringes. The sculpture is beautiful in spite of its foundation in hopelessness and despair. Arthur Robinson Williams presents intimate portraits of transgendered individuals and couples undergoing physical and emotional transformation in his photographic series My Right Self. Zanele Muholi takes us on a photographic journey through post-apartheid South Africa focusing on the subjective experiences of black lesbians in two of her series Only Half The Picture and Being.

The following artists are included in this exhibition:
Eric Avery (Texas)
James Morrison (New York)
Patricia Cronin (New York)
Zanele Muholi (South Africa)
Daniel Goldstein (California)
Conrad Ventur (New York)
Brian Kenny (New York)
Arthur Robinson Williams (Pennsylvania)
Slava Mogutin (New York)
David Wojnarowicz (New York)
Featuring the poetry of Staceyann Chin (New York)

These 10 artists express their most intimate feelings and strive for recognition through their own fine art. This exhibition consists of a range of media including sculpture, photography, video, and mixed media. Coinciding with Houston’s Annual Pride Festival, this exhibition shares aesthetic, philosophical, and political views and experiences from a legitimate segment of society.

Burning the Candle at Both Ends

Slava recently curated a fantastic online group exhibition now on view entitled "Burning the Candle at Both Ends" for Visual Aids, an arts organization that programs AIDS and HIV awareness into art through various exhibitions both in galleries (like the Postcards From the Edge benefit), and online.

Slava's curatorial statement:


In the documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, the luminary New York artist and filmmaker, interviewed shortly before his death in 1989, provocatively proclaimed that AIDS was the most glamorous way to die. He stated that he intentionally engaged in bareback sex in order to be infected with HIV, asking, "Why should only blacks and Puerto-Ricans be dying of AIDS and not me?"

Unlike most of his colleagues who struggled with the stigma and consequences of this awful virus, Jack Smith embraced it, going as far as glorifying it. He happily exchanged his underground celebrity status for a patient's bed in an AIDS care hospice where he was fed three hearty meals a day, up until the day when he could no longer eat.

Commenting on Smith's revelation, Thomas Kraemer, an independent researcher from Corvallis, Oregon, writes, "Today, I suspect people would be less charitable if they knew HIV 'gift giving' or 'bug chasing' was involved. However, [Smith] was clearly a pioneer in recognizing that the mythology around the heroic deaths from AIDS in the 1980s was 'glamorous' in an artistic way, if not in a rational way. Today, an AIDS death is no longer glamorous because there is no theatre of the absurd surrounding it. You get put in a standard nursing home to die with heterosexual geriatric patients."

Was it a coincidence that AIDS wiped out some of the most radical and experimental artists of the 80s? And was it a coincidence that they were just as radical and experimental in their private lives as in their art, "burning the candle at both ends"?

Everyone loves dead artists. Just try to imagine what the contemporary art world would be if Jack Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, Paul Thek, Félix González-Torres, Mark Morrisroe, Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz -- to name just a few most iconic AIDS casualties -- were still among us.

Would they be as radical if they didn't know that their days were numbered? Or would they, too, end up doing Levi's and Gap commercials? How much did their chemical and hormonal imbalances contribute to their radicalism, their vision and practice? And would they be as celebrated now if they hadn't burnt their candles too soon?

These were the questions that went through my mind while I spent hours going through the immense Visual AIDS archives and looking for clues and answers in thousands of slides, folder after folder, page after page.

I couldn't help using the work of David Wojnarowicz as a starting point for my selection. I read his first Russian translations back as a teenager in Moscow and it was the most powerful and overwhelming introduction to the pain and agony of the AIDS epidemic in Reagan-era America. His work became a major inspiration for my own writings, art and activism.

Focusing on lesser known names, I discovered an array of great artists -- both fallen soldiers, such as Robert Blanchon, Jimmy DeSana and Frank Moore, and our contemporaries Rene Capone, David King, Rogelio Mendoza, Gregory Veney and Frederick Weston.

Yes, everyone loves dead artists. But that's exactly why Visual AIDS plays such an important role in archiving and publicizing the work of those who are still among us, living and struggling with the virus that defaced and distorted the entire course and history of contemporary art.

My favorite pieces from the show:

"Gulliver Awake," 1994-1995
Frank Moore
oil on canvas on panel with enamel frame, 40" x 74"

"In the Bedroom #1 (Humpty)," 2002
Jonathan Leiter
mixed media, 22" x 8.5"

Untitled, 2000
Rogello Mendoza
acrylic on canvas, size n/a

"Hedgehog Boy Comic Book (Detail)," 2008
Rene Capone
ink on paper, 8.5" x 11"

"Untitled (Map)," 1990
David Wojnarowicz
mixed media, 33" x 48" x 0.5"


see the whole show:

BURNING THE CANDLE AT BOTH ENDS