Over the past four decades, the cultural production of Avram Finkelstein has been devoted to articulating political and social justice concerns, in particular in relation to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic and in public space. Widely recognized for his early agitprop postering with the Silence=Death Collective and Gran Fury, of which he was a founding member, his more recent endeavors in drawing and sculpture examine the distinctions between the parallel acts of memory and witnessing.
In this newly-commissioned installation, Finkelstein has designed six translucent panels to form a conceptual ‘sky’ of memory and witnessing that floats above the ‘earth’ of the New York City AIDS Memorial’s granite pavers and the reflective waters of the fountain below. These panels layer loosely rendered, hand-drawn clouds—a new style emerging for the artist which documents a reacquaintance with his own “disobedient body” after a stroke several years ago—and text that has been taken from the 1982 poem Bashert, by Irena Klepfisz: “These words are dedicated to those who died,” and “These words are dedicated to those who survived.” Seen through one another, these panels constitute a dialogue with the Memorial site, its emotional intentionality, and its uses of shadow and light.
The artist writes: “AIDS was my first pandemic,” and these recent works are “an attempt to come to grips with my second—COVID-19—stated as a skirmish between fact and frailty, corporeality and memory, commerce and survival, promise and cruelty. As a Jewish gay man, the shadow of the Holocaust has provided a framework that connects the inequities which undergird our cultural responses to many forms of social marginalization, as is masterfully articulated in Bashert.”
Dedications will be on view through December 2023. A reception for the artist will take place on Saturday, October 14, 2023 at 1PM.
