Tom Bianchi and David Getsy in Conversation
Friday, Sep 20, 1pm
Drawing Room, 2nd Floor
Chicago Athletic Association Hotel
12 South Michigan Avenue
Presented by New Discretions, New York
Tom Bianchi’s recent publication of two books of polaroids taken in the late 1970s and early 1980s provide an intimate chronicle of gay sexual and social life just before it would be radically changed by the AIDS crisis. During these same years, Bianchi was also a successful abstract artist of collages and constructions that embraced decorative excess and embedded queer signs. In recent years, Bianchi has returned to his work as a painter-sculptor with artworks that reflect on the on-going AIDS crisis and on the suppressed histories of homoeroticism.
He and art historian David Getsy will discuss how, across this history shadowed by the AIDS crisis, Bianchi has used both abstraction and photography to witness the life of desire and to fight against its invisibility.
