AIDS Activist Graphics & Lesbian Visibility (2024)

Video (1:32:00): Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva in conversation wirh Marlene McCarty from Gran Fury. Video by Poster House, 2024.

[The copyright of the video above remains with the original holder and it is used here for the purpose of education, comparison and criticism only.]

Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva is a New York based writer and art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation on art, AIDS, and lesbian identity in the United States. Currently, she is working on the book project Friendship as a Way of Art: Queer Identity and Visual Citation and is co-editing the first monograph of the queer 1990s gallery Trial BALLOON (forthcoming with Karma). Soboleva is a regular contributor to the Brooklyn Rail and BOMB magazine, and her writing has appeared in various exhibition catalogues and artist monographs. She teaches at the New School and NYU.

Marlene McCarty is an artist, designer, and activist who lives and works in NYC. She studied and was apprenticed at the once-renowned Kunstgewerbeschule Basel: Grafikfachklasse. McCarty was a member of the AIDS activist collective Gran Fury, co-founder of the transdisciplinary design studio, Bureau, and has exhibited globally as an artist since the 1990s. She is represented by the Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Gallery and is professor of Visual Arts at NYU Steinhardt. Her work is in the collections of major institutions, including the Brooklyn Museum, Kunsthaus Zürich, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.