AT THE ALLEN / SPRING 2025 / 17 Opening the second day of the symposium, Jessica Beck, a longtime curator at the AndyWarhol Museum, spoke on Warhol’s complicated handling of his partner’s AIDS-related death, as inflected by his Christian upbringing. The audience also heard fromAMAM-collection artist Creighton Baxter, whose portrait in the exhibition depicts the moment she felt the first effects of seroconversion, or the presence of HIV antibodies in her blood. Baxter offered a performative retelling of foundational traumas relating to her development as an artist and an HIV-positive trans woman. As attendees packed into the Ellen Johnson Gallery, some of the visitors milling about were in fact Oberlin College dance students who worked intensively over the previous two days with the Chicago-based artist and choreographer Brendan Fernandes. On command, they began dancing exuberantly and then collapsed on the floor, lying lifelessly before slowly helping one another back to their feet. They repeated these gestures of falling, rising, and supporting several times—from life to death to resurrection—against the backdrop of writhing bodies in works by DavidWojnarowicz, Keith Haring, Emma Amos, and others. At times they mimicked the limp, crossed legs of a 16th-century wooden Italian sculpture of Saint Sebastian in the center of the gallery. The performance ended with the dancers forming a human chain and guiding one another out of the gallery. Fernandes based the piece, Rising Again: Re-imagining “Stop the Church,” on a 1989 ACT UP demonstration and die-in at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, which occurred exactly 35 years prior to the performance. Peter Staley (OC 1983) delivered the final presentation. Staley was a foundingmember of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and has ledmany campaigns to counter the high price of AIDS medications and offer vital treatment information. He spoke about the role of Oberlin in motivating his life of activism. A concluding roundtable discussion covered strategies for reclaiming the contributions of overlooked Black and trans activists and the ways artists enact social and political change through their work. The speakers shared how the outbreak of AIDS, and the effectiveness of artists in responding, offered a blueprint for confronting future viral outbreaks andmass crises more broadly. Among the themes connecting AIDS and Christianity, judgment, guilt, shame, and redemption are core to queer experiences, as well as to the story of Christ, and to terminal illness. Plague, punishment, and wounded bodies as sacred bodies are central to the rhetoric of AIDS and to the New Testament. There is a lot of pressure on art to uplift and offer beauty, but this event demonstrated how art has been crucial in giving people permission to experience sadness and vulnerability. Visitors walked away with enduring models of how to cope creatively and productively with those heavy feelings. This event was co-sponsored with the generous support of the Art History Department’s Baldwin Lectures Endowment, with additional support from the Dance Department, the Office of Alumni Engagement, the Office of Gender & Attraction Initiatives (GAI), and the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life. The Allen is also grateful for generous support from the John H. ’29 and Marjorie Fox ’29Wieland Current-Use AMAM Support Fund. Recordings of the presentations are available online at amam.oberlin.edu/body-host. Brendan Fernandes Dee Dee Ngozi Chamblee takes a selfie with students and exhibition curator Sam Adams. Creighton Baxter MIKE CRUPI
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