Blocks of the AIDS quilt, specifically containing panels that represent the Indiana community, hang from the Atrium in Irwin Library. Photo by Darcy Leber.
LILY O’CONNOR | NEWS CO-EDITOR | lkoconnor@butler.edu
Irwin Library is displaying a unique collection of art entitled “The Birds of Sorrow: Giving Voice to Loss in an Age of Pandemic” throughout the month of April. The focal point of the exhibit is three, soon to be four, 12-by-12-foot blocks of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, specifically memorializing Indiana community members.
The AIDS Memorial Quilt was founded by LGBTQIA+ activist Cleve Jones in 1987 in memory of the lives lost to the AIDS pandemic. The project has since expanded to represent over 110,000 lives through almost 55,000 panels. Volunteers, activists, companies and loved ones of those lost create 3-by-6-foot panels — the size of a typical coffin — dedicated to a person or group of people who died of AIDS.
Sarah Ward, Butler’s performing and visual arts librarian, curated “The Birds of Sorrow” along with Madeline Eschenburg, an assistant professor of art. They chose to organize the exhibit in April because April 10 is National Youth HIV and AIDS Awareness Day.
Coincidentally, the exhibit opened on the day that the Trump administration made major cuts to the staff and budget in the Centers for Disease Control HIV prevention unit, the U.S. Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy and over 230 National Institute of Health-funded HIV/AIDS research projects.
“It’s really helpful to see what people in the past have done when they felt despondent,” Ward said. “If people feel as though their life is dissolving or that everything has changed, that can be [true]. Things do change over time, but as a community, we get through those changes together, and I think that this exhibition, hopefully, speaks to that.”
Ward and Eschenburg worked with multiple departments in the Jordan College of the Arts (JCA), including vocal performance, art, music and theater, to bring other art pieces, events and collaborative projects to the exhibit.
Two art installations, “Inflatable Baby” by Keith Haring and “Untitled” (L.A.) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, are also on display in Irwin Library in the space behind the atrium. Both of the artists died during the AIDS pandemic in the 90s.
“[Eschenburg and I] also talked about other artists whose lives were cut short by AIDS,” Ward said. “The ways that they did art, the ways they communicated with the public through their art and the ways that they had the public interact with their art were meaningful. [The artists are] Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died in 1996, and Keith Haring, who died in 1990. They were very adamant that their art was interacted with.”
“The Birds of Sorrow” includes two collaborative art pieces as well. “After Wind Phone” by Butler alumna Emma Landwerlen — modeled after the original wind phone in Japan — is meant to serve as a line of communication between the living and the dead. Students are encouraged to leave voicemails for their lost loved ones on the phone located in the main entrance of Irwin Library.
The second collaborative project, the MakerSpace, is a quilt — modeled after the AIDS quilt — that will become a part of the Department of Special Collections, Rare Books and University Archives. The Butler community has the opportunity to make 3-by-6-inch panels dedicated to a lost loved one.
The panels do not necessarily have to be dedicated to a person who died of AIDS, as it is meant to acknowledge grief and loss across the current generation. Students have created a 12-by-12-inch block dedicated to Sam Fingard, a third-year student who passed away on campus on March 25.
“The undergraduates on campus right now have gone through a lot of different kinds of loss,” Ward said. “There’s been the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been an opioid pandemic and there’s been a gun violence epidemic in this country. There are also a lot of people I know who have lost folks due to mental health issues, due to suicide. By the time you get to college, you’ve gone through some loss in your life.”
Wendy Meaden, the associate dean of JCA and a professor of theater design, organized the MakerSpace to allow students to commemorate their loved ones in a way that impacts the community.
“I love that those panels have so many different people’s struggles in them,” Meaden said, “It tells not just the individual story but also the story of family, friends and a larger community. I hope that having the panel for Sam and the other commemorative panels will help us all remember that just because a person is gone, it doesn’t mean their influence and our love for them are also gone.”
Additionally, a group of vocal performance students and faculty and collaborative pianists performed a recital of the AIDS Quilt Songbook, an ongoing collaborative song cycle of written and uncollected songs, texts and poems, on April 11.
Junior vocal performance major Rene Eaton is looking at how the music in the songbook can be used to diversify the songs that undergraduate students are performing.
“It’s important to recognize queer people today, and I think that this project lets us reflect on [the idea that] this happened in the past,” Eaton said. “But, what’s happening with queer identities now in the media? How are we responding to queer issues, and have we really moved past the silence that was experienced during the AIDS epidemic?”
In addition to the many art pieces displayed in “The Birds of Sorrow” exhibit, Butler Libraries and JCA faculty members have organized many events to further engage the Butler community. These include a black-out poetry workshop on April 17, a film series showing every Tuesday and MakerSpace office hours with Meaden every Friday.
Ward and Eschenburg are hopeful that “The Birds of Sorrow: Giving Voice to Loss in an Age of Pandemic” can not only help educate students, like Eaton, on the AIDS pandemic, but also inspire them to memorialize current grief and loss through art.
Julia Veres contributed reporting to this story.
