World AIDS Day: Artists and Activism

Artillery

Artillery is Los Angeles’ longest-running contemporary art magazine, owned and operated by working artists, writers and critics. Published six times a year, Artillery is conceived as a home for thoughtful essays by award-winning authors offering incisive criticism and informed observation that provide relentlessly honest and varied insider commentary on art and the context in which it is made while avoiding meaningless artspeak.

Rubén Esparza

Rubén Esparza (b. 1962 in El Paso, TX, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose works span the media of painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, and collage. As an independent curator, his artistic practice includes an extensive curatorial project record. Moving to Los Angeles in 1991, Esparza entered the local queer Chicana/o scene at a crucial moment of community organization, becoming among its leading organizers and leaders. Esparza studied Art History and Graphic Design at The Art Institute of Houston with continued independent art and curatorial studies. Esparza has developed a program of work that explores his individual cultural background as a queer Chicano and that of his community at large, staging reconciliations of this complex heritage across time and space.

His work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Rubell Museum, and the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, Illinois, among others. He has staged events and curated exhibitions across the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Esparza is the Founder and Director of the Queer Biennial and Queer Califas Exhibitions. https://www.rubenesparza.com/

Photo by HOMORIOT

Ken Gonzales-Day

Ken Gonzales-Day arrived in New York in 1983 where he would come to know a community of artists whose lives and work were deeply impacted by HIV/AIDS including Keith Haring, Félix González-Torres, and David Wojnarowicz. He is now a Los Angeles-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems ranging from lynching photographs to educational museum displays. His widely exhibited Erased Lynching series (ongoing), along with the publication of Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke University Press, 2006) transformed the understanding of racialized violence in the United States and raised awareness of the lynching of Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and African-Americans in California, and to see these collective acts of violence within the larger history of policing, anti-immigration movements, and racial terror lynchings. Gonzales-Day received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, an MFA from the University of California Irvine, an MA from Hunter College in NYC. He was a Van Lier Fellow in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program and his work has been widely exhibited: including The J. Paul Getty Museum; LACMA; MOCA; Luis De Jesus Los Angeles; Eastman Museum, Rochester; The Tamayo Museum, Mexico City; The Palais de Tokyo, Paris; The New Museum, CUE Art Foundation, The Kitchen, Jack Shainmann, and El Museo in NYC; The Generali in Vienna; and Thomas Dane Gallery in London, among others.

Photo courtesy of the speaker

Carolina A. Miranda

Carolina A. Miranda is an independent culture writer and critic based in Los Angeles, covering visual culture, design, performance, books, and digital life. Until early 2024, she was a columnist at the Los Angeles Times, where she produced in-depth reports on subjects such as the intersection of art and race, how communities are rethinking the nature of monuments and how architecture is shifting to accommodate a denser L.A. Her stories and reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Alta Journal, Artnews, the New York Review of Architecture and Fresh Air, and she is a regular contributor to the public radio station KCRW. Miranda is a winner of the 2017 Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism and a 2024 recipient of the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She also served as founding co-chair of the Los Angeles Times Guild, the first newsroom union in The Times’ nearly 140 years in existence. 

Photo courtesy of the speaker

Judy Ornelas Sisneros

Judy Ornelas Sisneros was a member of ACT UP Los Angeles from mid-May 1990 to January 1995. She was a member of the Women’s Caucus and in spring of 1991 she co-facilitated the Agitating & Legal Committee whose major action was the AIDSphobia in Hollywood campaign. From 1991 through 1993 she was one of three ACT UP Los Angeles representatives to the national umbrella ACT UP Network. She was arrested six times in civil disobedience actions that took place across the country. Sisneros was part the National ACT UP Women’s Caucus that co-organized the 1993 National Dyke March on the eve of the National LGBT March on Washington. She has curated or co-curated several exhibits: Loud, Proud and Pissed (2000) at the Highways Gallery2 in Santa Monica, Out Sights: Images from Sapphic LA's Photography Community (2004) in the Calvin Cottam Gallery at the ONE Archives at USC and Lesbians to Watch Out For: ‘90s Queer LA Activism (2017) in Plummer Park's Long Hall in West Hollywood. Her photos have appeared in several group shows, most recently in 2024 at the Dyke+ Arthaus Visits the Bureau exhibit at the Bureau of General Services: Queer Division in New York and Twenty Over Forty exhibit at the Haus Gallery in Philadelphia. Since 2021 Sisneros has been a co-producer of the ACT UP Los Angeles Oral History Project which to date has interviewed over 100 alumni. As an activist she has frequently picked up her camera to document not only community protests but also her queer community life in Los Angeles. 

Photo by Flavia Sparacino

Joey Terrill

Joey Terrill (b. 1955, Los Angeles, California) joins diverse mediums of zine-making, performance, printmaking, collage, and painting in a body of work that tenderly encompasses his intimate experiences of intersecting queer, Chicano and artistic communities. Drawing from the existing visual culture surrounding him, Terrill combines personal photographs, found pop cultural imagery, and reproductions of artworks by queer predecessors to conjure utopian landscapes. He is the former Director of Global Advocacy and Partnerships for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and has shown his work at venues including Ortuzar Projects, New York; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Park View / Paul Soto, Norris Fine Art Gallery, Score Bar, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Fowler Museum, Los Angeles; ONE Gallery, West Hollywood; Windows on White Street and El Museo Del Barrio in New York; and Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and El Museo del Barrio, New York; Hammer Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; and Art Institute of Chicago.  His painting, Painted by Her Brother, 1983, is one of the lead promotional images for Made in LA: Acts of Living at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum. His most recent solo exhibition, Still Here, was presented at Marc Selwyn in Los Angeles. 

Photo by Frederick Aranda