LOS ANGELES, CA.-For more than twenty-five years, artists have joined with activists, medical experts, and others to inspire, provoke, and guide the radical changes that the global AIDS crisis demands. Make Art/Stop AIDS—an internationally traveling exhibition that debuted at the Fowler Museum at UCLA shows how artists around the world have responded to HIV/AIDS and how their work can raise awareness, inspire activism, and ultimately help end global AIDS. The exhibition will be on display through June 15, 2008.

Featuring examples from the United States, South Africa, India and Brazil—four disparate nations whose distinct experiences with and responses to the epidemic make insightful studies —Make Art/Stop AIDS presents more than sixty contemporary works including paintings, sculptures, photographs, performance videos, posters, animated shorts, digital media, and installations that engage these questions: What is AIDS? Who lives, who dies? Why are condoms controversial? Are you afraid to touch? When was the last time you cried? Why a red ribbon? Are you ready to act?

“This collection of stunning works from around the world underlines the substantial contribution artists can make in times of crisis. This work is not for auction—it's not intended to raise money for AIDS services or scientific research. Its function, rather, is to intervene in the epidemic by shifting attitudes, educating, mourning, and goading, sometimes all at the same time,” says David Gere, co-curator.

What is AIDS?
Make Art/Stop AIDS opens by exploring how the AIDS epidemic is a socio-cultural phenomenon, shaped by belief, behavior, migration patterns, phobias, and gender-based inequities. Works of art make a significant contribution to defining the epidemic by reminding us that AIDS arises within our complex social worlds—worlds defined by difference, desire, inequality, and sometimes even violence. Included in this section are photographs that depict the various social impacts of AIDS by David Goldblatt, Zanele Muholi, Sunil Gupta, and others, as well as Lennart Nilsson’s strangely beautiful scanned electron microscope photograph of HIV, and a large-scale video projection by South African artist Churchill Madikida.

Who lives, who dies?
The next section of the exhibition illustrates how artists have made the political and ethical challenges of treatment a key focus of their work. Gregg Bordowitz’s installation Drive, 2003, which includes a line of clocks and the statement “The Aids Crisis is Still Beginning,” draws a direct connection between the epidemics in the U.S. and South Africa. Daniel Goldstein’s and John Kapella’s glittering, life-sized mobile Medicine Man, 2007, made of hundreds of pill bottles and needles, brings into focus the debate over access to life-saving medications. Photographs in this section by Pieter Hugo and David Wojnarowicz boldly address deaths caused by AIDS.