Esther McGowan Departs as Government Director of Visible AIDS
Esther McGowan, who since 2017 has served as government director of Visible AIDs, a recent arts group dedicated to elevating consciousness about HIV and AIDS, will depart her function on the finish of Might, Artnews stories. She is going to be a part of the not-for-profit images basis Aperture in June as director of improvement, charged with main the group’s fundraising drive forward of its 2024 transfer to a brand new dwelling.
McGowan arrived to Visible AIDS in 2012 as deputy director. Throughout her tenure there, she considerably elevated the group’s profile, growing its workers and shepherding its transfer to a bigger area that’s dwelling to its archives. Below her management, the Visible AIDs targeted on HIV+ girls, whose tales and plight have traditionally been ignored. Collaborating with by way of main establishments—amongst them MoMA PS1, the Queens Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum—the group held month-to-month Girls’s Empowerment Artwork Remedy Workshops, which have been based by artist and activist Shirlene Cooper. McGowan additionally secured the partnership of worldwide establishment’s for Visible AIDS’s long-running annual Day With(out) Artwork program, and inaugurated a brand new analysis fellowship and a sequence of artist-centered oral histories. Below her steerage, the group expanded its publishing roster, in 2021 releasing the primary monograph targeted on the work of experimental mixed-media artist Darrel Ellis, who died in 1992 of AIDS-related causes on the age of thirty-three.
“We’re excited to proceed the difficult work that Esther has initiated, and on the identical time wish to categorical how a lot she shall be missed by the Board, Workers, and Visible AIDS neighborhood,” wrote the board of Visible AIDS in a press release. “All through she has demonstrated a deep dedication to the group’s core mission and to its vibrant neighborhood of artists and activists.” A seek for her substitute is predicted to start shortly.