Banners screamed from the dingy walls of subway cars. Stickers shrieked from moving taxicabs: “Silence = Death.’’
Twenty years ago the New York activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, placed its stamp on the national landscape. Amid a mounting global health crisis, the group held protests calling for political action and waged a public relations campaign to raise awareness of the deadly disease.
Since mid-October, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at the Harvard Art Museum has been commemorating the group’s work through an exhibition called “ACT UP New York: Activism, Art and the AIDS Crisis.’’
In the 1980s thousands of Americans died of AIDS, said Helen Molesworth, the curator of contemporary art at the Carpenter Center. “The level of human loss was simply enormous, and the response to that loss was a really brave activism,’’ she said.
Through displays of posters and stickers, banners and signs, “ACT UP New York’’ showcases the outrage married with wry wit that the group plastered across the city’s walls. The exhibit also includes film footage of events, interviews with survivors, and this week, protest poetry.
For years, AIDS activists and renowned poets Eileen Myles (above) and Mark Doty have carried the fight in their own way - in a softer voice and a smaller font.
“Political posters and bumper stickers are made and carried to symbolize people. They’re all forms of language, it’s the same game,’’ Myles said. “A poem, in a way, can operate as simply as a flag. It’s a certain type of banner; it can be a complicated one or it can make one big direct statement.’’
Known to many as a “rock star of poetry,’’ Myles said she was not a “hardcore member’’ of ACT UP, but she did take part in various efforts.
“Poets are like birds,’’ she said. “We make our nests out of all that’s around us.’’
And, in the ’80s, AIDS was all around her. Myles recalled a time when too many days unfolded amid sterile, hospital walls. A particularly painful struggle involved the death of her good friend and fellow poet Tim Dlugos, who, ironically, came into a poem of hers just the other day.
She mused: “At an age where you’re worried about getting old, you watch your friends not having the opportunity to get any older.’’
Myles, Doty, and others will read tonight at 6 at the Barker Center, Cambridge. The exhibit will run until Dec. 23.
