Moving Forward with
Awareness and Compassion
For World AIDS Day: A Day Without Art, students from New School for the Arts joined forces with artist Gregory Sale to create a project that sets out to examine cultural, political and emotional awareness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
The New School for the Arts (NSA) is a public charter high school designed to provide an alternative program of instruction for students with a strong interest in the performing and visual arts. The visual arts curriculum includes classes in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, graphics, 2-D/3-D design, mixed media and portfolio development. Through a dynamic academic curriculum that is integrated to arts studies, NSA students are introduced to lifetime skills by practicing professional artists that prepare them to pursue higher education and/or a career in the arts.
Gregory Sale is an artist who teaches part-time at NSA. He is known for both collaborative and solo work in sculpture, installation and performance art. Last year for World Aids Day: A Day Without Art, Sale collaborated with Ronald James Winterrowd to present a sculpture, Blood Brothers at the Ice House in downtown Phoenix. Blood Brothers is part of a collaborative body of work about the love and commitment of a same-sex marriage entitled A Fairy Tale. Sale has also had solo shows in New York, Arizona and Virginia. He is a recipient of the Phoenix Art Museum Contemporary Forum's Material Fund Grant and a project grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
Moving Forward with Awareness and Compassion, which premiered December 3rd, is a collaborative project in which NSA students (ages 14 to 18) participated in developing an artistic vision to first recognize and then voice their personal relationship to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Sale structured the project's design and format, but gave students the space necessary to process and develop ideas for their own contributions to the work.
In preparation of the project, students participated in an education/research process which included the viewing of various HIV/AIDS documentaries and artists' videos and several round table discussions with their instructors, a local doctor and an AIDS activist.
Many students were involved in two concurrent projects: (1) making art pieces for an audience participatory exhibit about breast cancer at the Ice House entitled Invisible Woman and (2) painting a series of murals at Saint Joseph's Children's Hospital. Through these two outside projects, students experienced the relationship between art and illness.
To best integrate this project into the structure of New School for the Arts, the project's components were determined by artistic medium. Thus, the visual art instructors agreed to have class assignments which, when the assignments were integrated together, formed the overall art piece in that medium. Students who were studying in more than one medium participated in several assignments.
Gregory Sale and the many student collaborators/participants wish to thank the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the New School for the Arts and the ASU Art Museum staff for their generous support of this project and Ronald James Winterrowd for his inspiration and guidance. Partial funding for this exhibition and project was provided by a project grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
The ASU Art Museum wishes to thank Gregory Sale for all his hard work and dedication to the project, Chad-Bailey Nielson, Allison Russell, and Eric Weil for the great installation of the exhibition, the student collaborators and participants for the incredible work they produced, the faculty and staff at New School for the Arts and museum security for all their help during the premiere viewing.
A very special thanks goes to Vikki Dempsey, Heather Lineberry, Karen Moses, John D. Spiak, Michael Tucker, and Marilyn Zeitlin for making this exhibition possible.
For more information contact John Spiak at spiak@asu.edu.
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