Neilly Series: Avram Finkelstein

The Neilly Author Series was established in 2001 to invite a diverse range of authors to discuss their recent publications, their writing processes and the ideas presented in their work. This series is made possible by the River Campus Libraries through the endowed fund provided by University Life Trustee Andrew H. Neilly and his wife Janet.

 Please join us for our latest installment of the Neilly Series featuring 

Avram Finkelstein

as he discusses

After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images

Thursday, March 17, 2022
7 to 8pm
In person in the Hawkins-Carlson Room located in Rush Rhees Library or virtually via Zoom

Avram will be signing books immediately following the lecture.  Both After Silence and Up Against the Wall, Art Activism and the AIDS Poster books will be available for purchase. 

About the speaker:

Avram Finkelstein is an artist, activist and writer living in Brooklyn, and a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. He is featured in the American Artist oral history project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. His book, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images, is available through University of California Press, and was nominated for an International Center of Photography' 2018 Infinity Award in Critical Writing and Research, and a 30th Annual Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Nonfiction. He has worked in the permanent collections at MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, New York Public Library, the Smithsonian, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in England; his own artistry has been shown in galleries across NYC, including the Grey Art Gallery, and at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, DC. He has had numerous public commissions, and residencies at Pioneer Works and The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.

His practice also includes an experiment in political art-making, the "Flash Collective," a workshop centered on the creation of a one day collective to produce a single art intervention in a public space. Among the various institutions and non-profit organizations which have requested these Flash Collectives, Finkelstein has spoken about the initiative at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yale, The New School, SUNY and Visual AIDS. These flash collectives have exhibited in museums throughout NYC, as well as the Netheralnds and Switzerland, and are the subject of a documentary, After Silence, by Vincent Gagliostro.

Finkelstein has also been featured in numerous news outlets (New York Times, NPR, Silence Opens Doors, ACT UP Oral History Project) discussing art in the public sphere by international publications, and multiple film and oral history projects. Finkelstein is sought by both the New York City art world and universities to present his further expertise in political activism, LGBT politics and cultural production, the American Left, and art and intellectual property.