If you’re going to the galleries next Friday, you’ll walk through darkened rooms and see blank walls. If you’re meeting someone at the Art Institute, the lions may be draped with black cloth. And if you happen to be in New York’s Metropolitan Museum, you won’t see Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. In its place will be a small placard announcing that across the nation that day is “A Day Without Art.”
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Artists felled by the disease include the famous, such as Robert Mapplethorpe, and countless others with smaller followings: Peter Hujar, Cookie Mueller, and Chicago’s Gabor, to name but a smattering of the dead. Then there are those who, though still living, are sick, such as Keith Haring, whose graffiti-inspired work remains exuberant despite his diagnosis. And finally there are those artists who are part of the estimated two million Americans who are infected with HIV but still asymptomatic.
According to Jeff Abell, assistant director of the Randolph Street Gallery and the event’s other Chicago organizer, political circumstances have given the act of obscuring art another layer of significance. “People such as Robert Mapplethorpe–who even after his death is extremely controversial because of the fact that he would openly deal with homoerotic material–are subject to censorship. The right wing is trying to suppress him and many other artists dealing with issues surrounding AIDS, especially homosexuality.” AIDS politics as well as the AIDS virus threaten the art world.
Edelman agrees. “The action is just like civil disobedience,” she says. “Anybody who’s going around the district that day is going to constantly be going into all these empty, dark places. And they’re going to have to ask themselves, what is going on here? And that question is going to force them to get educated as to what is going on in the world as far as the AIDS crisis is concerned.”
