Artist Who Reflected on AIDS Dies at 62 – RisePEI

Hunter Reynolds, an artist and activist whose expansive work influenced generations and poignantly mirrored on the immense loss wrought by the AIDS disaster and took on that period’s homophobia, died on June 12 at his dwelling in New York’s East Village. He was 62.

The information was confirmed by Reynold’s gallery P.P.O.W., which described Reynolds in an announcement, as “a deeply gifted artist and resilient fighter” whose work “explored problems with gender, sexuality, HIV/AIDS, politics, mortality, and rebirth.”

The assertion continued, “Profound, lovely, and ferociously sincere, Reynolds’ work was straight influenced by his lived experiences as an HIV-positive homosexual man residing within the age of AIDS. … Reynolds used his visible and efficiency artwork apply to unfold a message of survival, hope, and therapeutic, and to reify queer histories so usually marginalized, sterilized, and forgotten.”

With a apply that spanned efficiency, pictures, and complex large-scale installations, Reynolds is probably greatest identified for his drag alter ego Patina du Prey, which he created in 1989, the 12 months he discovered he was HIV-positive, although he seemingly contracted it in 1984. Reynolds retired the persona in 2000 and it was the focus of an exhibition at P.P.O.W. in 2019.

With the recommendation of artist Ray Navarro (the 2 had attended L.A.’s Otis Faculty on the similar time and have become buddies in New York) in his head of not letting the illness management or outline him, Reynolds went on to make the period’s most poignant and highly effective reflections of the particular toll that HIV/AIDS had dropped at the nation’s queer communities.

Impressed by the drag queens who repeatedly carried out on the Pyramid Membership, one of many East Village’s legendary haunts, Reynolds was experimenting with “the feminization of my male face—placing on make-up and taking photos, which I had by no means carried out earlier than,” he recalled in a 2019 interview with Artforum.

It was an October night time and there was a gap on the Kitchen that night. He went out in “half drag, with a feathered hat and chest hair on show.” The night didn’t go as deliberate: “I figured, ‘It’s 1989 in New York Metropolis—it’s not going to be an enormous deal.’ Astoundingly, I used to be met solely with aggression.”

The next 12 months, Reynolds staged a significant efficiency as Patina du Prey in a bunch exhibition at Andrea Rosen Gallery, about six months after it had opened. Round this time, he started a photographic sequence titled “Drag Pose” that solidified what would turn into Patina’s signature look: a full face of make-up, no wig, no breasts, and a bushy chest peeking previous a deep-cut robe. A collaborative exhibition with artist Chrysanne Stathacos, devoted to Surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim, got here in 1992, the place Patina’s Banquet Costume debuted.

However, it was in 1993, when he moved to Berlin for a residency on the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, that Reynolds started creating the works that Patina would turn into greatest identified for. It was nonetheless three years earlier than antiretroviral remedy would now not make an HIV-positive analysis a demise sentence (for many who have entry to it). A whole lot of 1000’s of individuals have been dying.

“I didn’t know if I might be alive in two years or not. These years have been a number of the worst of the epidemic,” he stated of these days. He determined that in an effort to honor those that had died he needed to recite their names, so utilizing {the catalogue} of the NAMES Venture AIDS Memorial Quilt, he recited some 26,000 names as a part of a efficiency from a hospital mattress.

That finally led to Memorial Costume, a black ball robe with these 26,000 names screenprinted in gold onto the gown by way of a laborious course of. The columns upon columns of names go on and on, seemingly infinite. With all of the names listed on this manner, the quantity of loss feels directly incomprehensible and tangible.

The work first confirmed as a part of the ICA Boston’s groundbreaking exhibition “Costume Codes.” Reynolds told Another Man in 2019 that he hadn’t anticipated how a lot of a chord the work would strike. “I wasn’t ready for the depth of it,” he stated. “Individuals discovered the names of their buddies on the gown and started crying, having cathartic occasions in entrance of me. I did six weeks of performances nearly every day and it modified the route of my work, connecting to the physique and spirit, with the gown as a religious vortex to the universe.”

After its debut, Memorial Costume nearly instantly started to journey broadly, with Reynolds usually staging performances in it. In photographic documentation, Patina du Prey stands on a pedestal, her arms raised as she permits folks to understand the depth of the loss. At every staging, Reynolds exhibited the Memorial Costume with a guest book by which guests to the exhibition might add the names of family members who had additionally been misplaced to HIV/AIDS. In 1996, Reynolds up to date the Memorial Costume to incorporate the names amassed over three years with the help of the humanities nonprofit Visible AIDS.

“For many years, Hunter Reynolds’ work and life bore witness to the unflinching fierceness of compelling, genuine artwork making and advocacy,” Patrick Owens, a board member and former president of Visible AIDS, instructed ARTnews in an e mail. “He bore witness to how a strong and supremely artistic voice can increase the visibility of long-term survivors who proceed to encourage us. All of us at Visible AIDS honor Hunter as an artist, advocate, activist, collaborator, mentor, provocateur, visionary, and good friend.”

Reynolds’s mission to recollect those that had been misplaced to AIDS lined up along with his personal activist leanings. He had been an early member of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Energy), which fashioned in 1987 and sought to transform the dialog round HIV/AIDS by protests, training, medical analysis, advocacy, and artwork. Reynolds was current for ACT UP’s notorious die-in protest, referred to as Cease the Church, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in December 1989. As documented in one photograph, he was arrested exterior the church earlier than he might enter.

Earlier that 12 months, he based ART+ Optimistic as an affinity group to ACT UP to struggle homophobia and censorship within the arts. Amongst their most well-known actions was a 1989 protest on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York in opposition to laws introduced forth by U.S. Senator Jesse Helms to forestall the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts from funding artwork that was deemed obscene or indecent. Reynolds estimated that round 2,000 folks got here, together with artists like Barbara Kruger, Nancy Spero, Leon Golub, and Hans Haacke.

ART+ Optimistic’s formation was a response to artist Mark Kostabi’s quote in a Vainness Truthful article: “These museum curators, which might be for probably the most half gay, have managed the artwork world within the 80s. Now they’re all dying of Aids, and though I believe it’s unhappy, I do know it’s for the higher. As a result of gay males are usually not actively collaborating within the perpetuation of human life.” (Kostabi has since retracted and apologized for this assertion.)

“I knew him and I misplaced it,” Reynolds stated within the One other Man interview. “I needed to do one thing so I acquired my voice collectively, stood up in entrance of the assembly for the primary time, and created an motion in opposition to him. 60 folks confirmed up.”

Hunter Reynolds was born in 1959 in Rochester, Minnesota, and his household moved incessantly throughout his childhood to observe his father’s skilled soccer profession, spending time in numerous elements of Florida, together with Jacksonville and West Palm Seashore.

Amongst his earliest reminiscences, he stated in a 2016 oral history with the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Artwork, was associated to a traumatic expertise that occurred when he was about six months previous and his mom, who had postpartum melancholy, “severely burned me with scalding scorching water, and I keep in mind plenty of that have, particularly the therapeutic a part of it,” he stated. “I don’t keep in mind the precise burn. … [Y]ou do have psychic, visible, bodily reminiscences, and you may—they usually began manifesting as desires later as a baby, and I had recurring desires that have been, like, very intense.” A part of that therapeutic course of included artwork, along with his grandmother instructing him oil portray when he was 4 years previous.

On the age of 14 in 1973, Reynolds got here out as homosexual, the primary individual to take action in his highschool. He quickly began the primary Homosexual and Lesbian Scholar Union there, which grew to become the primary such group anyplace within the State of Florida. “My motion of popping out created this avalanche,” he stated. His mom, nevertheless, kicked him out of her home, and at 15 he moved to California to reside along with his father, who had moved on the market to be an actor. (His mother and father divorced when he was 7.)

Whereas he was nonetheless a teen residing in L.A. through the ’70s, Reynolds was kidnapped by two males for round three days. He was taken to a home in Laguna Nigel, in Orange County, and was tortured and photographed in numerous S&M positions as a part of one of many males’s aspect enterprise (he was an government at Shell Oil).

“I had had a lot expertise with struggling and ache, bodily, that I might psychically block all of it out,” stated Reynolds, who anticipated to die on this state of affairs. The lads had him signal a mannequin launch, sure him once more, put him within the automobile’s trunk, and dumped him on the aspect of a freeway. In his oral historical past, Reynolds stated that his testimony finally led to the 2 being caught and prosecuted.

Reynolds quickly immersed himself in Hollywood disco events as a strategy to heal from this trauma. Round this time, his boyfriend and mentor Richard Oreiro satisfied him to get his GED so he might attend artwork faculty. With that motivation, “I made a decision to reinvent my life,” Reynolds stated within the oral historical past. “I had three buddies that I might inform the story to, however I didn’t inform them the depth of it. And I by no means went to remedy over it. I simply merely moved on and listened to what these folks stated to me. You already know, if I didn’t have the power to, like, hearken to the recommendation of those wonderful homosexual males I had met, who ended up mentoring me, I might—I don’t know the place I might be.”

After graduating from Hollywood Excessive Grownup Faculty, Reynolds accomplished a 12 months in vogue faculty, earlier than deciding to use to arts faculty. He finally attended Otis-Parsons Artwork Institute (now Otis Faculty of Artwork and Design), finishing his B.F.A. in 1984. Shortly afterward, he moved to New York.

Whereas in New York, Reynolds held numerous stints at a number of the day’s most vital a number of galleries, together with Paula Cooper, Circles Artwork Gallery, and Annina Nosei Gallery, the place he was a preparator for a few of Babara Kruger’s earliest installations. Nosei additionally gave him his first New York solo present in 1986; the next 12 months he was included in a bunch present at Artists Area.

But it surely was after his HIV-positive analysis in 1989 that Reynolds’s artwork started to mirror on his personal analysis, serving as a witness to his personal experiences of residing with HIV. Along with the creation of Patina du Prey, Reynolds additionally created quite a few different memorable our bodies of labor, together with “Blood Spots,” by which he enlarged pictures of his HIV-positive blood dropped on paper, and “Mummification,” durational performances by which Reynolds was wrapped in cellophane and tape to resemble a mummy.

Between 1989 and 1993, Reynolds additionally amassed an enormous archive of New York Instances clips that handled HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ-related points. These clippings have been at first used for sequence like Dialogue Tables and Activist Media Installations, however then later grew to become the supply materials for a brand new physique of labor, “Picture Weavings,” that debuted at New York’s Participant Inc. in 2011. For the work, Reynolds scanned these information clippings after which superimposed pictures from numerous different our bodies of labor—“Blood Spots,” pictures of Patina, and extra—which might be then stitched collectively.

His artwork had come full circle. And in 2019 at P.P.O.W., Reynolds revisited the legacy of Patina du Prey for an exhibition titled “From Drag to Dervish,” displaying collectively for the primary time a lot of Patina’s clothes alongside different associated works, together with the bright-pink combined media set up Patina du Prey Vainness (1990–93) that the gallery had first proven on the 2018 Armory Present. On the event of his 2019 present for Patina at P.P.O.W., Reynolds instructed Artforum, “Don’t ever kill your alter ego off—she gained’t have it.”

However for Reynolds his life and artwork have all the time been about survival and each the loss and resilience that comes with that. He continued to make new entries into this “Picture Weavings” for over a decade. In a recent artist statement, he stated, “Viruses observe me round, like darkish shadows trailing my footsteps on the trail of life. Covid-19, HIV AIDs, Syphilis, Hep-C, HIV Strokes, Viral Fungal Infections on my mind. Sickness and demise have been a lot part of my life and artwork that I can’t separate them.”

“It appears no accident that Hunter not solely survived HIV, homophobia, the artwork world, most cancers, censorship, agism, ablism, and a lot extra,” stated curator and author Theodore Kerr, who carried out Reynolds’s oral historical past. “He additionally held on greater than every week after this 12 months’s HIV Lengthy-Time period Survivor’s Consciousness Day on June 5. He’s a tenacious survivor. Even along with his bodily demise, his spirit and art work reside on. On the journey to satisfy his life’s work, he chartered many paths for others to seek out and observe.”