A Bunch of Books: HIV/AIDS Traces in the Collections of the Center for Book Arts [Virtual Talk]

This event takes virtually on Monday, January 30th, 2023, at noon (12:00 PM) EST. Register to receive a Zoom link via e-mail.

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Everyone has heard this story: during the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis, the rate of death cases could be tracked by the skyrocketing number of times one bumped into a bunch of books lying on the streets or for sale in thrift stores. Not only were countless lives lost, but so were books and archives —an enormous body of knowledge, desires, and practices that, as a cultural heritage, it is up to us to recover, preserve, and activate. In this sense, what can Center for Book Arts’ collections narrate about this pandemic? As a result of the 2022 Book Art Research Fellowship, this talk aims to suggest actual and imagined accounts of this subject matter by presenting some of those artistic productions and biographies that often, instead of being the main topic of vast volumes, remain as discrete footnotes on the margin of a page.

This program and the Book Arts Research Fellowship is generously supported by the Pine Tree Foundation of New York.