Full Description
Up Against the Wall: Art, Activism, and the AIDS Poster offers nearly 200 examples of visually arresting and socially meaningful posters.
Taken from more than 8,000 held in the collection in the University of Rochester's River Campus Libraries' Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation. The collection, one of the largest of its kind in the world, was donated to the University of Rochester by Dr. Edward Atwater. The book accompanies an exhibition of AIDS education posters displayed at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY.
The posters, spanning the years from 1982 to the present, show how social, religious, civic, and public health agencies have addressed the controversial, often contested terrain of the HIV/AIDS pandemic within the public realm. Organizations and creators tailored their messages to audiences, both broad and very specific, and used a wide array of strategies, employing humor, emotion, scare tactics, simple scientific explanations, sexual imagery, and many other methods to communicate powerfully and effectively.
Contents
Foreword vii
Jonathan Binstock and Mary Ann Mavrinac
Preface: Locating AIDS in an Image Commons xi
Avram Finkelstein
Introduction: A Historical Perspective 1
Donald Albrecht
Worlds of Signification: Power and Subjectivity in Global AIDS Posters 9
Jennifer Brier and Matthew Wizinsky
Poster Portfolio 25
Introduction by Ian Bradley-Perrin
Curated by Donald Albrecht
The Collection 203
Jessica Lacher-Feldman
Afterword: Ending AIDS: Or How to Manage an Epidemic 209
William M. Valenti, M.D.
Contributors 214
Advisory Board 216
Acknowledgments 217
