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“To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific repercussions in the pre-invented world,” wrote David Wojnarowicz in his valedictory memoir Close to the Knives (1991).

For artists affected by the AIDS crisis, it was precisely this transformation that was demanded: grief made visible, anger turned outward. Wojnarowicz, an American artistic polyglot and AIDS activist ensconced in New York’s East Village scene, lived the consequences of this firsthand, his work an embodiment of personal grief as public resistance. For, in the face of institutional acquiescence, the responsibility for shaping the visual and cultural memory of HIV and AIDS would fall to artists and collectives themselves.

Despite substantial advances in the prevention and spread of AIDS since 1981, particularly the emergence of pre and post-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP/PEP) in the late ‘80s, in 2024 the World Health Organization reported more than a million new HIV infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, underscoring the epidemic as an ongoing global crisis. The persistence of the epidemic lingers somewhat uneasily alongside a renewed cultural fascination with AIDS-related art and activism. As funding for prevention and care is cut and official commemorations quietly disappear under President Trump’s administration, does the art world’s embrace of this work risk flattening activism into retroactive canon-building? And who, ultimately, should be entrusted as custodians of its past and present?

Private Grief to Public Action

In his essay Mourning and Militancy (1989), art historian Douglas Crimp described the “violence of silence and omission” enacted by institutions and the media during the height of the epidemic, which not only deepened loss but politicised mourning itself. Grief and rage took visual form in works wrought from diagnosis and loss, from Gregg Bordowitz’s militant auto-documentary Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993) and Joey Terrill’s comic-inflected memento mori to Félix González-Torres’s pile of diminishing sweets, an allegorical portrait of his partner, who died from AIDS-related complications. Collective acts of remembrance, such as the AIDS Memorial Quilt, as well as interventions like ACT UP’s Kissing Doesn’t Kill and Silence = Death campaigns, similarly refused inaction amid withheld funding and stalled research.

Today, a renewed wave of political and social regression as well as metastasising authoritarianism continues to shape the conditions under which LGBTQ+ communities live and create. Last year, the Trump administration eliminated 83% of US foreign aid programs in just six weeks, simultaneously erasing decades of work supporting HIV prevention and global LGBTQ+ initiatives, particular across the African continent. In the UK, major LGBTQ+ organisations are struggling in a hostile environment, with donations to groups like Stonewall falling by over 50%, while trans rights are increasingly restricted and access to essential services curtailed.

Where the very structures that sustain communities are under threat, attention pivots to art created under similar conditions of crisis. It is in this context that recent - albeit overdue - retrospectives of Hamad Butt and Peter Hujar, alongside exhibitions such as VIVONO: Arts and Feelings HIV–AIDS in Italy, 1982–1996, must be understood: projects of clear merit and necessity, yet also reminders of how trauma risks conversion into an opportune asset class.

The Long Wait for Recognition

The Indian-Canadian activist and photographer Sunil Gupta was living in London during the early years of AIDS activism, developing a transnational photographic practice centred on queer and diasporic identity. In this context, he co-initiated Ecstatic Antibodies, an exhibition and book addressing AIDS representation in the UK that included the divine self portraits of Nigerian émigré photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, whose work ennobled black, male queer desire, as well as multiple exposures of Joy Gregory’s Fury, Fate and Grace (1989). The project intentionally advanced a pro-sex, pro-queer perspective in opposition to the Thatcher government’s punitive response.

“There was virtually nothing happening at the museum and gallery level and cases were only rising,” Gupta says. “We couldn’t find any institution to take our project on in London. I remember the Hayward Gallery curator actually taking a step backwards when we went to see her.”

Circumspection was endemic. For many institutions, caution equated to self-preservation: action deferred until danger passed and dissent could be safely absorbed as history.

“The world was largely passive during the initial years of the AIDS crisis, including governments and museums,” says Sam Gordon, co-founder of the New York gallery Gordon Robichaux. “But not entirely. When Visual AIDS organised the inaugural Day Without Art in 1989, I remember seeing an Egyptian statue at the Met shrouded in black fabric—one of the most powerful visual statements I had encountered at the time.”

From Emergency to Archive

Gordon Robichaux resists the tendency for retrospective extraction, representing a number of living and deceased HIV-positive artists, including Clifford Prince King, Reverend Joyce McDonald and Frederick Weston, for whom diagnosis is often a peripheral rather than defining concern, or, as Weston has put it, “just another coin in the pouch”.

“The art always comes first,” Gordon says. “There remains a space for dialogue, and artists can be open about their status or sexuality while still achieving success. Living and working openly is what resonates most powerfully in the market now.”

Gupta, who was diagnosed with HIV in the mid-1990s, argues that the key distinction between past and present AIDS-related art is not merely its visibility, but its sense of urgency. “In the 1980s the political battleground was more clearly outlined,” he says. “In the eyes of heads of state, there was no real community to protect. Art was about direct, collective action because the threat was immediate. Contemporary art seems more self-oriented, more risk-averse, and more subject to the market.”

Current interest in AIDS-era art may therefore reveal less about progress than about what the market is finally willing to tolerate. As milestone anniversaries are reached, prices have predictably escalated. In 2025, Peter Hujar’s Self Portrait (with a String Around His Neck) (1980) sold for $252,000 - more than five times Christie’s estimate - while the work of Félix González-Torres continues to achieve record prices. Echoing criticisms levelled at the Smithsonian Museum last year for the omission of the powerful and personal sentiment behind González-Torres’ “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) in their labelling, Gupta warns that “the creation of a select few bankable stars risks detaching these histories from the real-world community action of the epidemic.”

The Risk of Erasure

Public repositories developed in good faith are vital to redressing this. Since its founding in 1988, Visual AIDS has set a critical precedent, curating exhibitions by artists with HIV from 1994 and producing and preserving projects such as the Play Smart safer sex kits (2010–19), which included artist-designed trading cards, condoms and lubricant. More recent initiatives like the AIDS Play Project, which revives theatrical works by writers whose lives were cut short by HIV/AIDS-related illness, demonstrate how preservation can function not just as memorialisation but as a living political practice.

Straddling the domains of archive, museum and public health resource, the Wellcome Collection is uniquely placed to address the cultural afterlives of those lost to the disease. The institution has been working closely with the UK branch of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) on Tenderness and Rage, a forthcoming exhibition focusing on stories of protest and intimacy around HIV/AIDS, opening this May.

“I think it is hugely important to facilitate intergenerational conversations around HIV and AIDS,” says curator Adam Rose. “The political force of art and activism comes from deeply personal bonds, and from rage that is focused, specific, and rooted in demands for care, dignity, and full humanity. Part of the exhibition’s work is to foreground those objects, stories and voices within our collections.”

Alongside recently acquired photographs from Gideon Mendel’s The Ward series, taken at the first dedicated AIDS ward in 1993, Tenderness and Rage will include stories from the photographer’s ongoing participatory project with UCLA, Through Positive Eyes (2008–present), centred on the lived experiences of people currently living with HIV. “It felt particularly important to revisit these experiences at a time when funding cuts and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric risk framing the epidemic as a closed chapter,” Rose says.

The exhibition also seeks to expand narratives beyond a dominant white, gay, male framework, aiming instead, as Rose puts it, to “recognise the specific resonances of HIV and AIDS in localities around the world while rejecting traditional divisions between the global north and south”.

What Took so Long?

This commitment to intersectionality has also shaped Gordon’s curatorial practice over the past decade. In 2016, he was invited by Visual AIDS to curate Persons of Interest, an exhibition that emerged alongside a broader wave of shows rethinking HIV and AIDS through intersecting identities and experiences. “The story of the crisis needed to expand to include everyone,” he says. “Black and white, straight and gay, male, female, trans.” Reviewing the exhibition, The New York Times reproduced Reverend Joyce McDonald’s sculpture in full colour on its front page beneath a headline that asked: Art of the AIDS Years: What Took Museums So Long?

Art does not exist in a vacuum; here lies the source of its power. As Wojnarowicz believed, “even a tiny charcoal scratching done as a gesture to mark a person's response to this epidemic means the whole world if it is hung in public. With enough gestures”, he suggests, “we can lift the curtains on the control room” that governs visibility. Making HIV visible in the art world demands responsibility—resisting depoliticisation, lazy universality and erasure—because silence is never neutral. It is a cushion of ignorance, and a position of power.