AIDS Through The Eyes Of Visual Artists

Post-apartheid South Africa is enjoying an explosion in the visual arts -- and simultaneously suffering from an explosion of AIDS infections. The two realities merge in “ArtWorks for AIDS,” an exhibition that premiered in Durban, South Africa, traveled to Washington, D.C., and Brussels, turns up in Cambridge on Nov. 25 and will be auctioned off in Boston on Nov. 30, to benefit AIDS and HIV research in southern Africa. The event is under the auspices of the Harvard AIDS Institute. Thanks to Ellen Phelan, director of Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the works will be on public view there from Nov. 25-28. Public Service Announcements about AIDS, created by William Kentridge, South Africa’s best-known contemporary artist, will be shown on the video wall of the Carpenter’s Sert Gallery. Kentridge has also donated a drawing to the auction, although it won’t be on view in the Carpenter beforehand.

“We’re doing this to try to reach a larger audience and create awareness of the crisis in Africa,” Phelan says.

Art auctions to benefit worthy causes are plentiful. What distinguishes this one is the level of the work, by 31 of the most renowned artists from six southern African countries, and the rare chance to see this material in the Boston area.

The exhibition’s curator, Marilyn Martin, the director of the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, is considered a hero in her country, having shepherded her institution through perilous times and made certain that contemporary South African art by artists of all races has been in the front galleries, and bucolic European landscapes relegated to the back. Martin has involved her museum in AIDS awareness since 1993, when SANG first exhibited a South African AIDS quilt.

This January, Martin began working on the “ArtWorks for AIDS” project, at the behest of the Harvard group and Bristol-Myers Squibb, which has committed $100 million to “SECURE THE FUTURE™,” a program to support women and children living with HIV and AIDS in southern Africa. Bristol-Myers [Squibb] commissioned the artists to create works specifically on the AIDS theme.

There is, in southern Africa, an element of denial over AIDS, as Martin well knows. “The subject of HIV/AIDS has not really been confronted by visual artists in the region and it is an emotional and controversial one,” she writes in the forward to the exhibition’s catalog. By inviting them to participate in the show, “we were challenging visual artists to aestheticize a complicated public issue, as many South Africans had done during the apartheid years, and we are engaging the transcendental potentialities of art as reconstructor of spiritual aspirations and restorer of human dignity.”

Martin introduces the work in a 10-minute video, “SECURE THE FUTURE: ArtWorks for AIDS,” which will be shown continuously in the Carpenter Center during the exhibition. She explains, for instance, the significance of Hentie Van Der Merwe’s photograph of a baby carriage studded with military ribbons: It’s an homage to women and children with AIDS, and it also looks like a hearse.

One South African-born artist known for powerful anti-apartheid art is Paul Stopforth, who has lived in Boston for more than a decade now, and whose wrenching works on the death in detention of apartheid martyr Stephen Biko have been the heart of major museum shows in London and New York in the past few years. A visiting lecturer at the visual and environmental studies department at Harvard’s Carpenter Center, Stopforth is deeply involved with the organizing of “Artworks for AIDS,” which he calls “the most substantial show of southern African art ever displayed in the Boston area.”

Because he lives here now, Stopforth is not part of “ArtWorks for AIDS,” but he will be installing the Carpenter Center presentation of works, which are by artists black and white, male and female, from Botswana, Swaziland, Namibia, Lesotho, and Zambia as well as South Africa. Their styles range from the jewel-like pattern painting of “Mother Aware,” by Valentim Macie of Swaziland, to the stitching on medical gauze of Namibian artist Trudi Dicks.

Among the artists who will be best-known to Americans are South Africans David Goldblatt, Johannes Mashego Segogela, and Penelope Siopis. Goldblatt’s 1999 color photograph of a housekeeper, Victoria Cobokana, and her children, looks like a record of a happy healthy family, but is in fact a heartbreaker: Cobokana died of AIDS last year, shortly after the photo was taken; her son died this past January, her small daughter, also infected with HIV, is not expected to live long. Segogela, known for shamanistic figurative wood carving, has created an eight-piece, painted wood installation of an AIDS patient and his deathbed entourage, including a TV cameraman, Siopis’s color photograph “Aids ¼ Baby ¼ Africa” is an infant bound in the red ribbon that is the universal symbol of AIDS. Siopis describes the baby as “both mummy and new-born, cold and warm, dead and alive,” adding that the red ribbon “can be empty rhetoric if action is missing.”

“ArtWorks for AIDS” is a call to action. The stats are horrific. In sub-Saharan Africa, there are 24,500,000 people living with HIV or AIDS, and 4 million newly infected last year; the comparable numbers for North America are 900,000 and 45,000. Works headed for the auction will be on view at the Carpenter Center from 9 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. on Nov. 25, 27, and 28; and noon to 11:30 p.m. on Nov. 26. The Sert Gallery, where the Kentridge PSAs will be shown, is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday.

After their appearance at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge, where the public can see them free of charge, the works in the show will be auctioned off on Nov. 30 at a gala at the Harvard Club, 374 Commonwealth Ave., with Martin in attendance, and Sotheby’s auctioneer Hugh Hildesley presiding. The works can also be previewed on the Web site http://aids.harvard.edu/artworks.

Tickets to the auction, which has live and silent components, start at $150 and include dinner. Absentee bid forms will be available at the Carpenter Center or by calling 617-432-5633, which is the number you can also call for tickets and more information. The alternative number for tickets and information is 617-495-5666.