Visual AIDS

Visual AIDS is looking for our next Development Director!

Full-time · New York City / hybrid · $75,000–$80,000
Preferred start date: November 1, 2026 or earlier

The Development Director will lead all aspects of fundraising and development at Visual AIDS, including institutional and individual giving, benefit events, and board engagement.

Working closely with the Executive Director, they’ll be a strategic and hands-on member of our small, collaborative staff, with significant opportunity to shape the next phase of our fundraising strategy and develop new sources of support.

We’re looking for an experienced fundraiser who is an excellent writer and communicator, highly organized and detail-oriented, and excited to build relationships with donors, funders, artists, and our broader community.

Benefits include comprehensive health coverage, generous paid time off, a four-day summer workweek, and seasonal office recesses.

Learn more and apply at the link in bio — and please share with anyone who might be a great fit!

After nearly four years with Visual AIDS, we’re celebrating our Development Director Shawn Escarciga as he moves on to his next chapter. 🚀

Since joining Visual AIDS, Shawn has steered the growth and evolution of Postcards from the Edge and the Visual AIDS Vanguard Awards and helped us reach a major milestone, growing our budget to more than $1 million for the first time—all with remarkable warmth, care, and humor.

We’re so grateful to Shawn for everything he has brought to Visual AIDS over the past four years. Please join us in thanking Shawn!

On the Visual AIDS Journal William Trlak reflects on the life and work of William Cullum (1958–2020), an artist who was among the first ten to join the Visual AIDS Archive. Considering Cullum’s artwork alongside his 2013 blog documenting his search for stable housing following his release from federal prison, Trlak traces how questions of space, confinement, and survival shaped the artist’s practice.

Read the essay at visualaids.org/journal

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Images:

[1] Portrait of William Cullum by Thomas McGovern, for the exhibition The First 10, 1995
[2] William Cullum, Boys +, 1995. Laser prints on paper, rabbit skin glue, 12” X 12”
[3] William Cullum, Behind the Fence, 2014, Oil on linen, 24” X 30”
[4] William Cullum, “The money shot for ‘Requiem’,” February 10, 2013

¿Es posible hablar del deseo cuando el mundo solo habla de virus? Este documental subvierte la narrativa trágica del VIH para situar el placer, el erotismo y los derechos sexuales de las mujeres que viven con el VIH en el centro del debate global.

Después de su estreno en 100 pantallas de cines y museos gracias a Visual AIDS , 25 festivales internacionales de cine, “El VIH se enamoró” de mí llega a International AIDS Conference 2026 !!!

No te pierdas en conversatorio a su codirectora Mariana Iacono 🔥

🗓️28 de julio
📍Film screening room / Global Village

We are seeking applications for a one-year Archive Fellow position to support us in publishing a finding aid to the David Hirsh Tapes Collection.

In 2024, Visual AIDS received a donation of over 500 audio and video tapes from David Hirsh, an arts writer and one of the founders of the Visual AIDS archive. The collection contains interviews with over 300 gay and le***an artists, gallerists, and curators in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

With funding support from the Council on Library and Information Resources, we are beginning a three-year project to digitize and describe the tapes, make them available online, and activate the collection with public programming.

🗃️ Archive Fellow
Part time, temporary (24 hours/week, Sept 2026–Sept 2027)
In-person position at the Visual AIDS office (Chelsea, New York City)
$25/hour with PTO

Duties Include:
– Liaise with interview subjects and confirm permissions
– Quality control and edit transcripts and audiovisual access files
– Assist with the description of the collection and creation of a finding aid

The Archive Fellow Should:
– Be a people person who can communicate empathetically with our diverse community
– Have a strong interest in learning about downtown New York art histories and its intersections with AIDS activism
– Be able to work in-person at the Visual AIDS office in Chelsea

📅 Application Deadline: June 21

Read the full job description at the link in our bio.

Images courtesy of Visual AIDS:
[1] A selection of tapes from the David Hirsh Tapes Collection.
[2] David Hirsh interviewing John Dugdale, 1994. Photograph by Eric Rhein.
[3] David Hirsh interviewing Martin Wong, 1993.
[4] David Hirsh interviewing Dui Seid, 1993.
[5] A selection of tapes from the David Hirsh Tapes Collection.

Join us on April 23, at 7pm for a performance and engagement by and . Grab a ticket at the link in our bio.

In this participatory performance and engagement, artists Tesora Garcia and Zacarías González come together to build an evening that questions our physical and spiritual nourishment inside of extractive, colonial systems. How does the process of communing in physical space allow us to envision new systems through curiosity and empathy towards each other? How can we plant the seeds within ourselves to imagine differently? As artists who hold embodied and nuanced relationships to health and wellness through the experiences of transness and/or living with HIV, Garcia and Gonzáles will prompt us to examine our collective power and potential. Tesora Garcia will lead a ceremony in which we will absorb “energy food” from an insect guide for purposes of healing and self-transformation. After the performance ceremony concludes, we will share a communal food moment led by Zacarías González that reflects on food sovereignty and its denial to communities deemed as other. Together, the artists will provide a meditative and intentional space for collective healing and exploration.

This event is organized by Center for Performance Research and Blake Paskal, Programs Director of Visual AIDS.

images:
1. performance documentation from “Pocahontas Revisted” by Tesora Garcia
2. image designed by Zacarías González

RESCHEDULED! Join Visual AIDS on Sunday March 29 (2pm) for a panel discussion with David Hirsh, Penny Arcade  and Agosto Machado focused on the David Hirsh Tapes Collection at Visual AIDS.

The event will feature clips from interviews with Steve Lott, Martin Wong, and Frank Moore.

Between 1990 and 1995, the journalist David Hirsh recorded more than 600 tapes of interviews and oral histories with over 300 artists who were active in the q***r arts scene of downtown New York. Hirsh’s relentless preservation effort through the tapes, as well as the Visual AIDS Archive he co-founded in 1994 with artist Frank Moore (1946-2013), was a race against time during the most fatal years of the AIDS crisis in the United States. In 2025, Hirsh donated his entire tape collection to Visual AIDS, who has recently secured a grant to digitize and make the tapes available to the public.

The panel is introduced by Kyle Croft and Jacs Rodriguez of Visual AIDS, and moderated by art historian Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez

Please RSVP for this free event.

Image: Sheyla Baykal, “Penny Arcade, David Hirsh, and Frank Moore, among others, at the Day With(out) Art Action at the Met”, 1994. Crop from gelatin silver print contact sheet, 8.5 x 11”. Courtesy Sheyla Baykal Archive and Soft Network.

Visual AIDS is excited to announce Alex Lenczycki, Chava Maeve Krivchenia, Claudia Mattos, Diogene Artiles, and Helena Shaskevich as our 2025–26 Research Fellows.

Claudia Mattos’s research proposes the first comprehensive art historical study of Craig Coleman’s (1961-1994) Miami-era practice, situating Coleman’s fusion of visual art, writing, and performance within the city’s q***r cultural history and the legacy of AIDS-era expression in South Florida.

Chava Maeve Krivchenia will sort through Garland Eliason-French’s (1942-1996) correspondence, personal journals, photographs, art documentation, and ephemera, and plans to map the artist’s creative influences, with a particular focus on her time spent in Chicago and the Midwest.

Alex Lenczycki will seek to illuminate the life and work of Gin Louie (1947-1994), a pivotal figure and former director of the Lower East Side Print Shop in the 1980s, with particular interest in his artistic transition to autobiographical assemblage following his AIDS diagnosis.

Helena Shaskevich will research artist Michael Tidmus’s (1951-2012) HyperCard projects with a specific focus on his 1987 The AIDS Stack. Made just prior to the widespread use of the world wide web, the work is an early example of AIDS related computer activism.

Diogene Artiles will look at the work of Miguel Ferrando (1957-1996), Dominican artist active in New York City’s downtown art scene during the 1980s and 1990s. Diogene is interested in Ferrando’s use of religious iconography, Dominican national symbols, and his artistic community and inspirations in New York City. .wav

Stay tuned — writing commissioned through the fellowship will be published on the Visual AIDS Journal in Fall 2026.

It’s time for another year of , the annual project that distributes hundreds of heartfelt valentines to women across the world living with HIV.

This year, Visual AIDS collaborated with two artist members, J. Hartz and Alexander Robateau, to create special-edition valentines. These valentines, along with letters of love from our community, will be mailed to women all over the world in time for February 14.

Are you interested in writing caring letters to a woman/women living with HIV? As women sign up to receive a valentine, they will be asked to share one or two interests/hobbies so that a personalized letter can be written for them. Come to our letter-writing party to help pen individualized letters to the 600+ recipients. Join us on January 31 at 2pm on the 3rd floor of No RSVP is required and the museum is free.

Are you a woman or femme living with HIV who would like to receive a valentine and letter? Click the link in our bio to sign up to receive a card.

More about the project:

Visual AIDS is proud to partner with ongoing collaborator MoMA PS1 for our annual project LOVE POSITIVE WOMEN. We are also proud to partner with the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, who printed the edition of Alexander Robateau’s valentines.

LOVE POSITIVE WOMEN is an international series of events that uses Valentine’s Day as a backdrop, creating a platform for individuals and communities to engage in public and private acts of love and caring for women living with HIV. LOVE POSITIVE WOMEN is an ongoing project established by Visual AIDS artist member in 2013.

After the event, the valentines will be mailed around the world to HIV-positive women in time for Valentine’s Day. Women living with HIV often experience isolation and stigma and face specific challenges around relationships, motherhood, and healthcare. Since 2015, the project has distributed over 4,000 cards in order to fight stigma, create community, and empower women living with HIV.