Lavender Light Gospel Choir

December 27, 1991
208 West 13th Street
Photo © 1991 Dona Ann McAdams

This evening event, presented in conjunction with the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center’s Kwanzaa celebration, featured gospel singing, a panel discussion, and a screening of Them Children Can Sing, a film/video work-in-progress about the Lavender Light Gospel Choir. In a panel discussion on the topic of gospel music in the lesbian and gay community, panelists explored the lyrical content of a selection of songs, discussed the implications of gospel as a literary form and oral tradition, and explored why particular songs have gained great significance for the African-American lesbian and gay community. The event was held in partnership with the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center.

Marina Alvarez, Ellen Spiro with Jonathan Lee, producer

December 1, 1991
Citywide
Photo © 1991 Ellen Spiro

This twenty-six minute video focused on the heroic and positive response of Latina women to the current AIDS crisis. Through community education, poetry, activism, and dance, women with AIDS challenged notions of female invisibility and complacency in the face of the epidemic. (In)Visible Women was the second project of Fear of Disclosure, a series of videos that explored the act of revealing that one is HIV seropositive or has AIDS. The video was televised with six viewing dates in Manhattan and the Bronx arranged in observation of World AIDS Day and Day Without Art in December 1991.

Additionally, in partnership with the Video Data Bank and Women Make Movies, the Fear of Disclosure project advocated the distribution of (In)Visible Women to Hispanic and Latino communities, women’s organizations, AIDS care and service providers, prisons, and the general public. Copies of the tape were given to hospitals, women’s centers, community agencies, libraries, universities, private foundations, and other artists nationwide. Through Transit Media, English and Spanish order forms were disseminated to individuals and community groups who had ordered AIDS-related videos in the past.

(In)Visible Women won the Best Video Award at the San Francisco Gay & Lesbian Film Festival in June 1992 and was screened at the World AIDS Conference in Amsterdam, where Marina Alvarez spoke at the opening plenary session on women and AIDS. A special showing of (In)Visible Women took place in October 1992, as part of the Commissioner’s Forum on Women and AIDS, presented under the auspices of the Community Development Agency of New York, for an audience of hundreds of community-based organizations serving low-income populations in New York City.

Special thanks to Arthur Williams, The Tape House, and Women Make Movies. In remembrance of Phil Zwickler, Iris De La Cruz, and Irma Luz Nieves.

Merry Conway, Noni Pratt, Albert Ratcliffe

October 30-November 24, 1991
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue
Photo © 1991 Tom Brazil

As A Dream That Vanishes was both an installation and performance considering the inevitability of death and the intimate rituals of life. The audience was invited to browse through a series of rooms filled with shelves and cabinets full of memorabilia, encouraged to open drawers, touch and examine the mementos, and sift through the layers of emphemera. The second part of the evening combined film and sound with a live performance by Albert Ratcliffe with Merry Conway and Noni Pratt, which observed the small rituals of letting life go. Conway and Pratt also produced an artist’s book, available at each performance, which included text, photographs, and raw material from the piece. Over 1,200 people attended the exhibition.

Gregg Bordowitz and Richard Elovich with Bob Huff and Loring McAlpin

October, 1991
Citywide via television
Photo courtesy of Creative Time

Clean Needles Save Lives documented the illegal ACT UP needle exchange program on the streets of New York, in which former and recovering drug users spoke about risk reduction and safer sex to an audience that included current drug users. The documentary video addressed straight, lesbian, and gay drug users, in or out of recovery, and served as an organizing tool for people who are not perceived by the dominant media or the government as deserving of AIDS prevention, health, and treatment services.

The ACT UP needle exchange program was established in February 1990 following the closure of the New York City Health Department pilot program. Operated largely by volunteers, the needle exchange served seven hundred to eight hundred injection drug users a week in the Morris Heights/Highbridge section of the Bronx, East Harlem, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and the neighborhoods of Bushwick and Williamsburg in Brooklyn with cleaning works, condoms, and information about safer sex practices as well as referrals for drug treatment and health services. By 1996, plagued with internal division over tactics and its relationship to the larger AIDS and gay and lesbian movements and depleted by the deaths of many members, ACT UP still existed but was widely considered moribund. Nonetheless, the organization’s use of direct action was an example of the effectiveness of unconventional politics in the face of the unresponsiveness of policy elites.

In June 1991, Richard Elovich and Gregg Bordowitz were among the eight AIDS activists from ACT UP and the National AIDS Brigade acquitted of needle possession charges.

Spencer Finch, Paul Ramírez-Jonas

September 28-29, 1991
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue
Photo © 1991 Alyson Pou

Masterpieces Without the Director was an alternative audio guide of nineteen of the best-known masterpieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The free guide followed the same route as the Met’s official tour, but added public commentary, sound collage, and thoughts on the architecture, history, and myths of the institution. Opinions of media celebrities, politicians, military leaders, and the general viewing audience were included. In revising the audio guide in this way, Finch and Ramírez-Jonas represented varied aesthetic and political positions and drew parallels between the classic artwork and contemporary popular culture, calling into question the didactic modes of traditional museum audio guides.

An audio guide release party took place on the steps in front of the museum on September 28 with over two hundred people taking the tour that day. The guide (packaged with a map, instructions, and postcards) was available from Creative Time, Book & Co., and Printed Matter.

Joey Arias, Dorian Corey, Deee-Lite, The Duelling Bankheads, Loretta Hogg, Ebony Jet, John Kelly, The Lady Bunny, Lipsynka, Ruth Messinger, Mona Foote Dancenoise, Peau de Soie, Ru Paul, and others

September 2, 1991
Union Square Park
Photo © 1991 Robbie Laurenco

In 1991 Creative Time worked with Wigstock organizers to help promote the annual event’s temporary new location, Union Square Park, after the historic venue for the event, Tompkins Square Park, was closed to the public. Conceived in 1984 and commenced in 1985, Wigstock is an annual outdoor music festival celebrating love, peace, and drag costume and performance in a revisionist tribute to the 1969 Woodstock. 1991 performers included drag queens, performance artists, pop stars, poets, and other diverse acts such as Dancenoise, John Kelly, Peau de Soie, Deee-Lite, Ebony Jet, Lipsynka and Loretta Hogg. Wigstock encourages its audience to display themselves as vividly as those on stage, making the day a unifying and reaffirming experience for everyone involved.

Paula Josa-Jones and Pauline Oliveros

August 23, 1991
Lincoln Center
Photo © 1991 Tom Brazil

Skin, a collaboration between composer Pauline Oliveros and choreographer Paula Josa-Jones, was an innovative performance integrating text, visual design, music, and dance. The set consisted of three twenty-foot long suspended paper trees equipped with microphones, which amplified the sounds of the performers’ movements. Oliveros executed the piece’s score at the very edge of the stage, using common as well as unusual household items, an accordian, and her own voice. Over eight hundred people attended the event, which was free and open to the public.

Black Market International, Bosho, Dumb Type, Linda Fisher, Bob Flanagan, Mimi Goese, A. Leroy, Manhattan Marimba Quartet, Virgil Moorefi eld, Adam Peacock, Hahn Rowe, Arthur Russell, Dick Sandhaus, Linda Carmella Sibio, Bill Stair, Martha Wilson, Guy Yarden, Daniel Zippi

July 10-September 7, 1991
Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage
Photo courtesy of Creative Time

Art in the Anchorage 8 was an eclectic grouping of performances and artwork loosely based around the complex theme of pain and suffering. Works included: pH by Dumb Type, a multimedia performance exploring uncharted “post-histories”; W. Va. Schizophrenic Blues, by Linda Carmella Sibio, which took as its subject the artist’s schizophrenic mother; Sick, by Bob Flanagan, a piece that addressed a sexually masochist artist who has cystic fibrosis and ritualizes pain; and a performance by Black Market International, a cooperative of European artists in which the performers work independently of one another, which explored themes such as existence and social relations.

Tomie Arai

June 23, 1991
70 Mulberry Street
Photo © 1991 Alyson Pou

In conjunction with the opening of the Chinatown History Museum in the former P.S. 23, Tomie Arai created an installation of silkscreened banners for the building’s majestic stairwell. Scrolls and street signs found in both contemporary and traditional Asian culture were the inspiration for the banners, which were assembled into public “pages” designed to be read by visitors while ascending and descending the five-story stairwell. The banners highlighted three historical periods in Chinese-American history: the “bachelor society” of the early 1900s; the growth and expansion of the 1950s; and contemporary New York Chinatown. Now known as the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, the institution houses seven Chinese-American organizations which draw hundreds of visitors daily from the region and around the nation.

La Fura Dels Baus

June 12-15, 1991
Kaufman Astoria Studios, 34-12 36th Street, Queens
Photo © 1991 Robbie Laurenco

La Fura Dels Baus, a Spanish performance ensemble from Barcelona, Spain, has received acclaim as one of the world’s most dramatic and intense contemporary performance groups. Employing spectacle, ritual, sculpture, music, and theater, their four performances of Suz/o/Suz at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens were attended by almost four thousand people. Suz/o/Suz invoked metaphors for historical human conflict stemming from the struggle for power: performers were submerged in giant water tanks, dangled from a complex network of harnesses and ropes, climbed two-story rolling towers, then dissolved into post-battle swirls of smoke. The performance was produced in partnership with The Kitchen, P.S. 122, and The New York International Festival of the Arts.

Miralda
June 7-30, 1991
World Financial Center Winter Garden, 200 Vesey Street
Photo © 1991 Tom Brazil

Presented by the World Financial Center Arts and Events Program, The Honeymoon Project was a seven-year series of international events and installations to mark the five hundred year connection between Europe and America. Culminating in the unveiling of a one hundred foot wedding dress created for Lady Liberty at Winter Garden, the project explored the exchange of ideas, customs, and goods between Europe and the New World and celebrated the courtship and symbolic wedding of the Statue of Liberty and the Columbus Monument in Barcelona, Spain. Besides the immense wedding dress, The Honeymoon Project featured a bridal veil, wedding rings, a honeymoon video, installations of drawings and photographs, love letters from Lady Liberty to Columbus written by New York City school children, and traditional Spanish dance performances.

Algernon Miller

June, 1991
Citywide
Photo © 1991 Algernon Miller

For Creative Time’s poster project, Algernon Miller created an image to recognize the high percentage of African-American men serving in the United States military. Miller used both archival and personal photographs of soldiers ranging from the turn of the century to the present day in order to represent the fact that African-American men make up fifty percent of the armed forces. On June 10, Miller and numerous volunteers attended the Operation Welcome Home ticker tape-parade and distributed the posters and postcards to participants and observers; additionally, the posters were later mailed to twelve thousand individuals and organizations.

Corina, Juliet Cuming, Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth), Lady Miss Kier, MC Lyte, Kate Pierson (B-52’s), Crystal Waters, Tina Weymouth (Tom Tom Club)

June, 1991
Citywide
Photo © 1991 Nan Goldin

Via the medium of a televised public service announcement, Juliet Cuming reintroduced the debate around pro-choice politics to a generation of MTV-era women who grew up post-Roe vs. Wade, and therefore may have been unaware that their right to a safe and legal abortion was in jeopardy. Working with female role models from the pop music community, Cuming’s PSA was produced at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens with the support of two hundred volunteers and contributors from the film, fashion, and photography industries. The video received extensive media coverage in publications such as Newsweek, Rolling Stone, The Daily News, New York Post, The Village Voice, Backstage, and XS, with many of the articles addressing Cuming’s difficulty in getting the PSA aired. Creative Time’s sponsorship of the project made the organization a target for attacks by the right-wing press as part of ongoing efforts to discredit the National Endowment for the Arts.

Station House Opera

May 1-4, 1991
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street
Photo © 1991 Tom Brazil

Station House Opera, a London-based visual, architectural, and performance collaborative, presented Black Works, a performance that employed strategies of authoritarianism and formlessness to comment on constraint and freedom and the relationship of the individual to society. Covering the floor of the space with a field of white flour, seven performers moved in response to commands from radio headsets and ambient voices emanating from speakers, their actions intersecting and diverging in a random manner shaped only by forces outside themselves. A visual narrative emerged as tracks and signs, including many images of tangible products of western civilization, accumulated, overlapped, and disappeared on the canvas of the floor. Black Works was produced in partnership with The Kitchen.

Jerri Allyn with Helen Thorington

May, 1991
Citywide
Photo © 1991 Jerri Allyn

Angels Have Been Sent to Me was a mobile interactive art project by Jerri Allyn about aging and disability. Encouraged to use wheelchairs or crutches or wear a blindfold while listening to stories about aging and disability on headphones, participants experienced, if only for a moment, life without the physical and cognitive abilities most of us take for granted. In order to demonstrate the project, Allyn traveled to eleven sites in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens, including schools, community centers, and art spaces, and many of the recorded stories were broadcast nationally on NPR.

Nancy Burson with Kunio Nagashima

April, 1991-April, 1993
Citywide
Photo © 1991 Nancy Burson

A collaborative project between artist Nancy Burson and Kunio Nagashima, a scientist working on AIDS research, Visualize This was a series of AIDS visualization posters that contained images of healthy and unhealthy T cells photographed using a scanning electron microscope. The images were juxtaposed with the explanatory text: “The image on the right is a normal T cell which defends the immune system from infection. The image on the left is an HIV infected T cell.” Visualize This offered a clinical representation of a reality often associated with many false stereotypes and predjudices, effectively utilizing the transformative power of scientific imagery and art to inform the general public about AIDS.

Karen Finley

May, 1990-April, 1991
First Avenue between 1st and Houston streets
Photo © Dona Ann McAdams

Addressing the horrors of AIDS and the feelings of “otherness” those with AIDS may experience, Karen Finley’s “The Black Sheep” was a nine-stanza poem cast in bronze and installed on a concrete monolith at the intersection of First and Houston streets.

The Black Sheep

After a funeral someone said to me
You know I only see you at funerals
it’s been three since June–
been five since June for me.
He said I’ve made a vow–
I only go to death parties if I know someone before
they were sick.
Why?
’cause–’cause–’cause I feel I feel so
sad ’cause I never knew their lives
and now I only know their deaths.
And because we are members of the
Black Sheep family.

We are sheep with no shepherd
We are sheep with no straight and narrow
We are sheep with no meadow
We are sheep who take the dangerous pathway through
the mountain range
to get to the other side of our soul.
We are the black sheep of the family
called Black Sheep folk.
We always speak our mind
appreciate differences in culture
believe in sexual preferences
believe in no racism
no sexism
no religionism
and we fight for what we believe
but usually we’re pagans.
There’s always one in every family.
Even when we’re surrounded by bodies
we’re always alone.
You’re born alone
and you die alone–
written by a black sheep.
You can’t take it with you–
written by a former black sheep.

Black Sheep folk look different from their families–
It’s the way we look at the world.
We’re a quirk of nature–
We’re a quirk of fate.
Usually our family, our city, our country
never understands us–
We knew this from when we were very young
that we weren’t meant to be understood.
That’s right. That’s our job.
Usually we’re not appreciated
until the next generation.
That’s our life. That’s our story.
Usually we’re outcasts, outsiders
in our own family.
Don’t worry–get used to it.

My sister says–I don’t understand you!
But I have many sisters with me here tonight.
My brother says–I don’t want you!
But I have many brothers with me here tonight!
My mother says–I don’t know how to love someone like you!
You’re so different from the rest!
But I have many mamas with me here tonight!
My father says–I don’t know how to hold you!
But I have many daddies with me here tonight!

We’re related to people we love who can’t say
I love you black sheep daughter
I love you black sheep son
I love you outcast, I love you outsider.
But tonight we love each other
That’s why we’re here–
to be around others like ourselves–
So it doesn’t hurt quite so much.
In our world, our temple of difference -
I am at my loneliest when I have something to celebrate
and try to share it with those I love
but who don’t love me back.
There’s always silence at the end of the phone.
There’s always silence at the end of the phone.

Sister–congratulate me!
NO I CAN’T YOU’RE TOO LOUD.
Grandma–love me!
NO I DON’T KNOW HOW TO LOVE
SOMEONE LIKE YOU.
Sometimes the black sheep is a soothsayer,
a psychic, a magician of sorts.
Black sheep see the invisible–
we know each others thoughts–
we feel fear and hatred.
Sometimes some sheep are chosen to be sick
to finally have average, flat, boring people say
I love you.
Sometimes, black sheep are chosen to be sick
so families can finally come together and say
I love you.
Sometimes, some black sheep are chosen to die
so loved ones, families, countries, and cultures
can finally say
Your life was worth living!
Your life meant something to me!
I loved you all along!

Black sheeps’s destinies are not necessarily in having
families, having prescribed existences–
like the American Dream.
Black sheeps’s destinies are to give meaning in life
to be angels
to be conscience
to be nightmares
to be actors in dreams.

Black Sheep can be family to strangers
We can love each other like MOTHER
FATHER SISTER BROTHER CHILD
We understand universal love
We understand unconditional love
We feel a unique responsibility, a human responsibility
for feelings for others.
We can be all things to all people
We are there at 3:30 a.m. when you call
We are here tonight ’cause I just can’t go to sleep.
I have nowhere else to go.
I’m a creature of the night
I travel in your dreams
I feel your nightmares.

We are your holding hand
We are your pillow, your receiver,
your cuddly toy.
I feel your pain.
I wish I could relieve you of your suffering.
I wish I could relieve you of your pain.
I wish I could relieve you of your destiny.
I wish I could relieve you of your fate.
I wish I could relieve you of your illness.
I wish I could relieve you of your life.
I wish I could relieve you of your death.
But it’s always
Silence at the end of the phone.
Silence at the end of the phone.
Silence at the end of the phone.