A massive new art exhibition just opened in a new gallery created specifically for the show. At the corner of Halsted Street and Fullerton Avenue, a former bank has been re-imagined as a museum. Now called the Alphawood Gallery, the space is home to an exhibition that offers a variety of creative points of view on AIDS, art and America.

TRANSRCIPT

Jonathan Katz, curator of “Art AIDS America”: The exhibition itself is really informed by a kind of a refusal of the way AIDS has been, up till now, represented, which is in terms of activist graphics, in terms of obvious iconography of emaciated bodies or red ribbons.

What we wanted to do was instead address the bulk of art produced around AIDS which by design didn’t show AIDS in an obvious way, in fact that isn’t visible as “AIDS painting” necessarily.