Avram Finkelstein, Dedications, 2023; Courtesy of the artist, commissioned by the New York City AIDS Memorial; Photography by Celeste Godoy.
Over the past four decades, Avram Finkelstein has been devoted to articulating political and social justice concerns, with a particular focus on the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic. Finkelstein is 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.
Let’s visit Avram Finkelstein: Dedications at the NYC AIDS Memorial.
The New York City AIDS Memorial announces a free public outdoor concert of City Park, a controversial early work by maverick American composer, cellist, producer, and singer Arthur Russell (1951–1992), which integrates chamber music, electronics, concrete poetry, turntablism, and modern rock. The new, site-specific version at the Memorial, directed by Nick Hallett, features percussionist David Van Tieghem, who participated in the work’s premiere, and Peter Zummo, another primary Russell collaborator, in collaboration with a later generation of musicians invested in Russell’s legacy, including Nat Baldwin, Lea Bertucci, Shawn O’Sullivan, and Alex Waterman (ensemble subject to change).
The live concert will be presented as a part of the Memorial’s Fall Arts & Culture Season and the West Side Cultural Network’s first West Side Fest on September 30, 2023, at 4 PM.
For those of us with the good fortune to have a place to hang our things, a closet is a magical container, a collection of materials, arranged by each of us that at a glance can reveal our values, desires, cares, and even our deepest secrets. Time itself is frozen inside a closet in contrasting meters and timelines, fragmented in things accumulated and arranged in juxtaposed order, stacked and aligned, quickly thrown or casually dropped there to be taken care of later. The scene is set, and the narratives that blossom come alive whenever the doors swing open, giving us a reading, a reminder, an understanding of who we are, where we have been, secrets, and dreams we hold. Boxes concealing our heart’s contours, scribbled messages scratched on folded notes and cards, photos, records, files, all the stuff worth saving for the reason that each thing signifies, all these choices contained in the holding space, the closet.
NYC AIDS Memorial Park at St. Vincent’s Triangle, 76 Greenwich Avenue, NYC
The New York City AIDS Memorial will mark the annual observance of World AIDS Day with an afternoon and evening of free and public programming with partners including Housing Works and Queer Soup Night.
