Research

I started my adult career as a performing arts critic in San Francisco during the epidemic. At the time, every artist worth his or her salt was dealing with loss on a massive scale, because it was all around us. Most of the new visual or performing arts work being made at that time was in some way reacting to, or seeking to create change in relation to, HIV and AIDS. Suddenly, without having planned it, I had landed in the realm that crosses from art to health.

When I decided to do a Ph.D. at UC Riverside, I realized that there was scholarship to be done on how dancers and choreographers were affected by AIDS, and how they participated in bringing about the end of the AIDS epidemic. I culled through a decade of documents about art made in that era. But I also had my own primary experiences as a critic to draw from, witnessing artists in the trenches and writing about them. So my early research involved getting inside the dances, the music, and to some degree the visual arts made in that era. 

In 2004, when I went to Bangalore on a Fulbright scholarship to witness artist interventions in India’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. My project plan was just to be an observer but the artists began to ask me questions about what other artists were doing in other parts of the country. This is when the great shift for me took place, when I realized that I had become the hub of an activist wheel. Soon afterwards, with the help of Fulbright contacts and UNAIDS, I organized a meeting of artists from around the country to share basic ideas and practices, and to bring everyone up to date on the most current health information. At that moment, I wasn’t just researching the artists doing the work; I was inviting those artists to share information and ideas with one another, and with me. So my research turned into activism. And that’s what I do now. UCLA’s Art and Global Health Center is the umbrella for all kinds of research, ranging from creating new models for intervention to working with social scientists to study those models for effectiveness. 

Sometimes the attentive look in an audience member’s eye or the volume of their clapping isn’t enough to tell you. The problem with this kind of subjective evaluation is that it is very non-verbal, and very non-specific. It doesn’t tell you everything you need to know. For example, one project we have helped to develop is an AIDS education program in the largest hospital in India. The project was devised by a local theater group called Nalamdana, which means “Are you well?” in Tamil. They had developed a series of narrative plays about AIDS, and their program was so effective they started a daily radio broadcast within the hospital. We had every reason to believe the new radio show would be very effective too. But a full-scale survey showed it worked very well for men, but not for women. I could never have guessed that in advance, from the look in the eyes of listeners. We learned that women were responding differently to this entertainment-based program than men were. Women take such great responsibility for their families in South India, they were feeling the weight of diagnosis much more heavily than men were, and were too depressed to really “hear” the radio. Men were more happy-go-lucky, more inclined to accept the entertainment value of the program. So on account of this information, which we couldn’t have gotten had we not been working with social scientists, a series of support groups for women was added to this intervention. 

One of our projects, Through Positive Eyes, a collaboration with photographer Gideon Mendel, depicts people living with HIV. In some instances, you might look at somebody’s picture and say, “oh yeah, I can see they have HIV.” But in the vast majority of these portraits, you’d just see these people’s physical and inner beauty. One of the photos, in fact, shows a man in Mexico who has the most amazing six-pack you ever saw. I’ve seen people stand in front of that photograph, not just because it’s erotic, but also to marvel at the apparent health of this person’s body. It tells you something about what’s possible now with new anti-viral treatments.

Dance is based on the body. Our reading of bodies, and our love of sensuality, and our fears of the things that might injure us bodily, all conspire to make dance especially potent. These things can be addressed in choreography in ways that are deeper, and potentially more memorable, than in other forms of art. There’s something about the body itself being present in dance that has made it a place where stigma and fear have risen to greatest heights, but also where some of the most powerful works of art have been made.

When I was co-creating an art exhibition at UCLA called MAKE ART/STOP AIDS with Robert Sember, a South African, we realized we wanted to bring together works of art from various countries. Because the epidemic is a socio-cultural phenomenon as well as a biological one, different countries have responded to the epidemic with completely different interventions. In Brazil, for example, the constitution actually guarantees people’s right to health care, so more advanced drugs were made available very quickly. By contrast, in South Africa AIDS denialism held sway for way too long, and as a result millions of people lost their lives who didn’t have to. In line with this, different sorts of artwork emerged from every country. For our exhibition, we brought together works from Brazil, South Africa, India and the U.S. And it wasn’t long before the countries that we worked with were lobbying us to bring our exhibitions to them. Right now, I’m working with Carol Brown, who is based in Durban, South Africa, on a portable art exposition we’re calling A.R.T. (Anti-Retroviral Treatment). The idea is for artists to create new works that address the changes in their lives that come with access to anti-retroviral treatment. This might manifest in works about living fully as opposed to preparing for death, for example. So much AIDS artwork work from the late 1980s had to do with heaven. We want this to be a portable exposition contained in steamer trunks that are easy to move and unpack and display. We hope to send it out to the countries all around southern Africa, and also to bring it to the world AIDS conference in Washington, D.C. next July.