Robert T. Ford, the publisher and co-editor of Thing Magazine, a black and queer arts publication, wrote a five-part series of articles, “Life During Wartime,” that documented his personal struggle with HIV/AIDS. Ford died of an AIDS-related illness in 1994.
Plenty of New York art world figures have taken umbrage with MoMA over the decades, but the artist Ben Morea may be the only one who actually managed to shut it down. “They had the entrance of the museum barricaded, with cops behind it,” Morea told the New York Times of the day in 1966 when his manifesto targeting the staid arts institution as one of the objects of a “total revolution, cultural as well as political and social,” persuaded nervous museum staff members to bar the doors pre-emptively. This is the flyer with the printed manifesto he taped to MoMA’s door, simply reading: MUSEUM CLOSED.

“Like everything to do with AIDS, I didn’t set out to become any of the things that would eventually define my life,” says Greg Ellis, archivist, curator and creator of Ward 5B, which takes its name from the first AIDS ward in the world, established at San Francisco General Hospital in 1983. 

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Growing up in the notorious Tenderloin neighbourhood of San Francisco, Ellis saw the effects of heroin on family and friends — as well as the early cases of AIDS spreading among intravenous drug users (IVDUs). In 1986, Ellis and a friend moved into an old Salvation Army building in SoMA, a San Francisco neighbourhood long known for its history of radical queer sex clubs and working-class community. 

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“Our loft space quickly became a central meeting place for the cabaret performers, artists and musicians that would come to represent the AIDS activist community, and served as a de facto shooting gallery for our friends who were IVDUs,” Ellis says. “It was also the set for numerous straight and gay porn films.”

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In 1980, John Fekner stenciled the words Broken Promises, Falsas Promesas, Decay, Broken Treaties and Last Hope on the walls and buildings of the decaying South Bronx, drawing attention to the inhumane living conditions of the area residents. This piece printed in conjunction with the South Bronx radical arts space Fashion Moda, includes the infamous photograph of Reagan with Fekner’s stencil on the burned out building behind him.
This is a photocopied flyer by John Giorno published by Visual Aids on the occasion of the 1993 instalment of a Day Without Art. Giorno was a longtime advocate for those with AIDS. For over two decades from 1983 onwards, Giorno Poetry Systems made emergency grants to those who fell ill, proving a lifeline during the crisis.

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