A small crowd dressed in red and adorned with red HIV awareness ribbons gazed at photos of art pieces on a large projector screen in rooms 240 and 242 of Fayetteville State University’s Rudolph Jones Center on Monday evening. One piece was made from red Japanese rice paper and symbolized the transformative power of HIV information. Another, a multimedia piece that included a red HIV awareness ribbon, represented people living with HIV’s ability to reach their dreams.
The works were presented as part of the Cumberland County HIV Task Force’s “Healing Through Art” event to celebrate World AIDS Day, officially observed on Dec. 1 each year. The students whose works were presented are some in a long line of HIV/AIDS art activists.
“Our showcase was meant to draw participants of all ages to express themselves and use a form of art to express the importance of awareness and prevention,” Tamra Morris, deputy director of the Cumberland County Department of Public Health and vice chair of the task force, said in a speech at the event.
Art has been a key form of HIV/AIDS activism since the Centers for Disease Control released its first report on AIDS in June 1981. HIV is a virus that attacks the immune system. AIDS is the most severe stage of HIV’s three stages.
The Silence=Death Project, an AIDS activism collective, designed the now iconic pink triangle “Silence = Death” poster. The poster’s imagery became a key symbol in HIV/AIDS activism after the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, adopted it. In collaboration with ACT UP, Keith Haring used “Silence = Death” in his piece, “Ignorance = Fear / Silence = Death.”
ACT UP’s graphic design arm, Gran Fury, made even more art. Visual AIDS uses art as its primary form of activism for people living with AIDS and HIV prevention. The AIDS Memorial Quilt is a visual memorial to the lives lost to AIDS-related illnesses. For the first time since the AIDS epidemic began, President Joe Biden displayed 124 of the quilt’s 50,000 sections on the White House South Lawn on Sunday to commemorate World AIDS Day.
In 2022, North Carolina ranked 10th for rates of people newly diagnosed with HIV. Cumberland County had 1,695 residents diagnosed with HIV last year, the sixth-highest number in the state, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Seven hundred and thirty-two of those residents were diagnosed with AIDS.
“We know that HIV is heavily impacting those from [ages] 14 to 24,” Morris told CityView. “So we wanted to find a way to collaborate with our local university and really appeal to students through artistic expression.”
The task force asked artists to focus on health equity in HIV education, prevention and treatment. LGBTQ+ and BIPOC people are disproportionately impacted by the virus and have often been stigmatized. In 1988, Gallup found that 44% of Americans believed “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior.”
The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, or UNAIDS, reported stigma and discrimination are still the largest barriers to HIV prevention and care worldwide in its report for World AIDS Day 2024.
Some stigmas, like that HIV is a “gay disease,” produce misinformation about how the disease is spread. HIV spreads through blood, breast milk, pre-seminal fluid and semen, and rectal and vaginal fluids. HIV has not been documented to be spread through saliva. It can spread to anyone who has unprotected sex with someone with untreated HIV, not just men who have sex with men.
“The stigma is still there and the mindset of people that it can only affect gay people because that’s what they’re seeing on TV when they advertise the [HIV prevention and treatment] medications,” Yvonne Early, head of the task force’s education committee, said. “They’re not seeing the women. They’re not seeing the children. They’re not seeing people that are born with HIV. They’re not seeing that whole picture.”
Despite progress in HIV treatment and prevention, the World Health Organization considers the AIDS epidemic ongoing. In its 2024 World AIDS Day report, UNAIDS said the world is not yet on track to end AIDS as a public health threat despite, the report states, having the means to do so.
For Dennis Corbin, head of the task force’s grant committee and associate professor of FSU’s school of social work, events like “Healing Through Art” and the task force’s future HIV/AIDS events are an important reminder that HIV is still prevalent and impacting people.
“People [with HIV] think, ‘People just pass me by and I’m still here having to deal with this disease, and no one’s thinking about me,’” he said. “We [the task force] are thinking about you. We’re the lonely little voice over here in the corner, but we haven’t forgotten about those people that are still being infected.”
It’s for them, said Eric Murray, chair of the HIV task force and HIV/STD program coordinator for Piedmont Health Services and Sickle Cell Agency, that the task force is fighting for those living with HIV/AIDS — through art and every other avenue they have at their disposal.
CityView Reporter Morgan Casey is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. Morgan’s reporting focuses on health care issues in and around Cumberland County and can be supported through the CityView News Fund.