When the organizers of “Art AIDS America” — Jonathan David Katz, an art historian at the University at Buffalo, and Rock Hushka, chief curator of the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington – tried to travel the show, they found few takers. Mr. Riggs’s angry, demanding cri de coeur stays in the mind long after you’ve left the Bronx Museum of the Arts. “Art AIDS America” is a show at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and it coincides with a cluster of smaller Manhattan shows, two of which more imaginatively address the same history. The art establishment, which had tiptoed around gay and AIDS-related art when government arts funding began to be cut, now considered it old news. Art was very much in the picture, because artists were hard hit by the epidemic, but also because art is (or can be) strategically useful.

Source: New York Times July 28, 2016 22:08 UTC