The Daily Bulletin Archive

The Burchfield Penney Art Center, AIDS Community Services of Western New York, and E. H. Butler Library's Archives and Special Collections will host an observance of World AIDS Day today in the Burchfield Penney from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. with a press conference at 11:00 a.m.

The observance will feature more than 50 handmade memorial quilts crafted as tributes to beloved Western New Yorkers lost to AIDS. The quilts, known as the Mending of the Hearts Memorial Project, are being displayed throughout the main foyer of the beautiful new art center. This unique display provides an opportunity for the public to remember the emotional impacts of HIV/AIDS in Western New York. Each quilt represents a personal testimony of an individual who lost his or her battle with AIDS.

An exhibition of the Madeline Davis Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Archives of Western New York will accompany the quilt exhibition to demonstrate the effect of 30 years of AIDS on the Western New York GLBT community and its accompanying devastation to the arts community both locally and nationally.

At 7:00 p.m., Madeline Davis, founder of the GLBT Archives of WNY, and Gerald Mead, adjunct lecturer of design at Buffalo State, will present 30 Years of AIDS…Where Have All the Artists Gone? at the Burchfield Penney.

While most people now know that AIDS is not a “gay disease,” that was not true in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Thirty years ago, the first reported AIDS cases were all gay men, and as the numbers of people with HIV and AIDS grew, communities of gay men continued to be disproportionately affected. Among them were thousands of visual and performing artists, some well known, such as Keith Haring and Michael Bennett, and many, many more whose talents were just emerging. During the past 30 years, AIDS has devastated the arts industry—locally, nationally and globally. No other industry has suffered the depth or volume of loss to this disease as our arts and cultural institutions.

This panel discussion will offer a unique perspective of the impact of AIDS on the local and national arts community. What would the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s galleries and collection would look like today were it not for AIDS? How many brilliant but now unknown artists might have been represented?

Davis is a renowned and highly respected GLBT community advocate as well as the founder of the Madeline Davis GLBT Archives of Western New York, now overseen by the Archives and Special Collections department of Buffalo State's E. H. Butler Library.

Mead is an adjunct lecturer in the Design Department at Buffalo State and an independent curator, arts writer, and art collector. During his 18-year tenure (1987–2005) as a curator and educator at the Burchfield Penney, he organized more than 130 art, architecture, craft, and student exhibitions for the museum, developed accompanying programming, and edited numerous exhibition catalogs.

World AIDS Day is observed every year on December 1. The World Health Organization established World AIDS Day in 1988. World AIDS Day provides governments, national AIDS programs, faith and community organizations, and individuals with an opportunity to raise awareness and focus attention on the local and global AIDS epidemic. An estimated 33 million people worldwide are living with HIV/AIDS, more than 1 million of them in the United States. Locally, as many as 5,000 people may be living with HIV/AIDS.