Click to see the Voices for America mural

Click to read press release: Members of Congress to Speak at May 25 AIDS Ceremony on Capitol Hill;  Cortada's murals dedicated

What do you have to say...about AIDS?
Post your thoughts in the AIDS Discussion Forum

 

Join Miami artist Xavier Cortada in creating the Voices of AIDS mural during Voices 99:  Renewing the Commitment (the 5th Annual Conference of the AIDS Policy Center for Children, Youth and Families in Washington, D.C.).

Conference participants and on-line supporters are encouraged to include their "voices" in the collaborative mural.   They are asked to contribute messages (on small pieces of papers or through the discussion forum) which Cortada will incorporate directly on the mural.   This is a method similar to that of the AIDS Quilt--whereby hundreds of individuals contribute their piece (voice) to create a larger collaborative mural.

Collaborators are asked to focus on these questions:

1. What does renewing the commitment mean to you in the battle against AIDS?

2. How have you or your community been affected by HIV/AIDS? Is there any person or any event that you particularly remember?

3. What would you say to educate your communities, what strategies would you recommend? What message would you like to give others?

The Voices of AIDS mural will begin as a blank canvas on the 23rd of May, 1999.  By the 25th, when it is unveiled and dedicated on Capitol Hill as part of the Closing Plenary, the mural will have captured the individual and collective voices of AIDS as expressed by the conferees and the on-line participants.  Over the next two years, the AIDS Policy Center intends to tour this mural and the Bridging the Gap mural in a two year awareness generating campaign.

You can help create the Voices of AIDS mural by taking a moment now and posting your ideas in the AIDS discussion forum (www.cortada.com/AIDSforum_frm.htm).

The Voices 99 Conference will also feature an exhibit of the Bridging the Gap mural --a six meter-long mural created by Xavier Cortada in collaboration with the participants of the 12th World AIDS Conference in Geneva, June 28 - July 3, 1998. The mural is presented courtesy of United Airlines, travel sponsor. about the Bridging the Gap mural | news article on the mural

Cortada's other collaborative AIDS murals have included: Miami's Voices in 1996-97, Little Havana's World AIDS Day in 1997 or Geneva's Bridging the Gap in 1998.

For more information on the Voices of AIDS mural or the Voices '99 Conference, please contact:
Mary Collett Partlow, MSW,
Voices 99:  Renewing the Commitment
AIDS Policy Center for Children, Youth and Families
918 Sixteenth Street NW, Suite 201
Washington, DC 20006
telephone:  202-785-3564