Salt Lake City – The Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) will join thousands of other arts institutions in observing the 26th annual Day With(out) Art on Tuesday, December 1, 2015. The Museum will be open late, until 6 pm, and offer visitors several opportunities to reflect on the ongoing effects of AIDS on the art world and our society:
—Throughout the day Cyrus Edwin Dallin’s The Scout (1910) will be draped in black cloth. This bronze sculpture in the Museum’s art of Utah and the West collection depicts a mounted Native American scout peering into the distance—the future. When covered, the figure’s view of his surroundings will be obstructed, and visitors’ view of this important piece will be denied.
—Also throughout the day, Radiant Presence, a slideshow of works by artists with HIV/AIDS will be screened in the Museum’s Katherine W. and Ezekiel R. Dumke Jr. Auditorium. Created by New York-based Visual AIDS along with influential artists, activists and curators, the slideshow provokes conversations about HIV criminalization and stigma, access to treatment, the shifting demographics of people living with HIV and the disproportionate effect of the epidemic on communities of color and transwomen. RadiantPresence #DayWithoutArt @visual_AIDS
—At 4 and 5 pm, Museum educators will offer two short tours of the Museum’s permanent collection that touch on themes of human sexuality, parenthood, gender identity and consent.
—At 6 pm, the Planned Parenthood Association of Utah (PPAU) Teen Council will present guest speaker Jason Atwood, a 28-year-old HIV-positive homosexual male from the Utah AIDS Foundation’s speaker’s bureau, in the auditorium. The lecture is free to the public, but attendees are encouraged to bring a canned food donation to benefit the Utahns Against Hunger (UAH) food pantry.
On December 1, 1989, in response to the worsening AIDS crisis and coinciding with the World Health Organization’s second annual World AIDS Day, Visual AIDS organized the first Day With(out) Art, a day of mourning and action that would celebrate the lives and achievements of lost colleagues and friends and encourage caring for all people with AIDS, educating diverse audiences, and finding a cure. On that day and every December 1st since, arts organizations, museums and galleries have participated by shrouding artworks and replacing them with information about HIV and safer sex, locking their doors or dimming their lights, and producing exhibitions, programs, readings, memorials, rituals, and performances.
For more information call (801) 581-7332 or visit www.umfa.utah.edu