Introduction

Picturing AIDS: 1986-1996

Rudy Lemcke

The exhibition consists of art and cultural work about the AIDS crisis; primarily created during the years between 1986 and 1996. The work addresses AIDS not only as a unique viral pandemic but also as a political and cultural phenomenon. The language of its representation is as complex as the socio-political fields from which it is articulated. Its picture is not singular or fixed but fractured and multi-dimensional. It is as private as it is public.

The LGBT Community Center’s 2nd, 3rd, and 4th floors’ public and gallery spaces contain my work from this period, not in a chronological fashion, but in a way that clusters ideas and themes that I have been developing over the years.

For those of you who are too young to remember the early years of the epidemic, I hope that this exhibition will give you a frame within which to picture an intensely complicated, often painful, but more often heroic era in the history of our community.

Rudy Lemcke 
The LGBT Community Center
 San Francisco, California
 2007