Mark World AIDS Day with a full itinerary of free programs at museums in St. Louis. Start with a special Day With(out) Art Brunch at CAM hosted by the legendary Vanessa Frost featuring live performances, a portion of the AIDS Memorial Quilt on display, free HIV testing, and a screening of videos commissioned by Visual AIDS.

Day With(out) Art is a national program that originated in 1989 on World AIDS Day as a celebration of lives and achievements of lost artists and colleagues. With participation from hundreds of organizations, Day With(out) Art encourages ongoing efforts to destigmatize and find a cure for HIV by showing care for those living with a positive status.

Tickets are required to attend this event at one of two options:

• Program tickets are free and include a raffle ticket for prizes, and access to the performances and videos, with seats available on first come, first served basis or to accommodate accessibility needs.
• Brunch tickets are $15 and include the program ticket benefits listed above as well as premium seating at front-row tables and a boxed brunch from AO&Co.

Complimentary coffee and orange juice will be available for all guests; speciality coffee drinks and cocktails will be available for purchase at AO&Co at CAM.

Learn more and purchase your program or brunch tickets here.

Associated Events

In addition to the program at CAM, guests are encouraged to  attend free programs at two other cultural sites participating in World AIDS Day:

• Attend the lecture by Dr. Steven Thrasher about his book The Viral Underclass on December 1, at 2:00 pm at the Missouri History Museum.
• Visit the exhibition Gateway to Pride at the Missouri History Museum, on view through July 6, 2025.
• Visit the exhibition Scott Burton: Shape Shift located next door at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, on view through February 2, 2025.

Day With(out) Art Video Program

Since 2010, Visual AIDS has commissioned and distributed a video program for Day With(out) Art, coordinating screenings at over 100 venues around the world. This year’s program Red Reminds Me… features short videos reflecting the emotional spectrum of living with HIV today. Through the red ribbon and other visuals, HIV and AIDS has been long associated with the color red and its connotations—blood, pain, tragedy, and anger. Red Reminds Me… invites viewers to consider a complex range of images and feelings surrounding HIV, from eroticism and intimacy, mothering and kinship, luck and chance, memory and haunting.

Video Synopses

• Gian Cruz, Dear Kwong Chi

In Dear Kwong Chi, Cruz creates a video letter to the late artist Tseng Kwong Chi, drawing from the experience of living with HIV in diaspora. Across continents and decades, Kwong Chi’s legacy acts as an anchor for Cruz amongst limited representations of Asian narratives in AIDS histories.

• Milko Delgado, El Club del SIDA

Taking its title from a sensational telenovela episode, El Club del SIDA cycles through a lifetime of heavily stigmatizing images about HIV and AIDS. Delgado plays with multiple aesthetics—documentary, horror, comedy—to explore the various relationships he has had with AIDS over the course of his life.

• Imani Harrington, Age of Knowing / Scraped

A professor is asked to help a young child who has been Scraped and is soon faced with a moral dilemma that either exposes the truth or upholds a lie. With a nostalgic aesthetic, Age of Knowing / Scraped traces memories of an AIDS past that continue to haunt the present.

• David Oscar Harvey, Ambivalence: On HIV & Luck

Ambivalence: On HIV & Luck tackles the disorienting experience of existing with a manageable condition that our present culture insists on representing in terms of its bleak past. Interested in figuring HIV differently, the film presents a series of visual puns merging the iconography of HIV and AIDS with popular symbols of luck.

• Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar, El VIH se enamoró de mi (HIV Fell in Love With Me)

HIV Fell in Love With Me tells the story of a woman with HIV embracing her sexuality and reconnecting with her pleasure. Filmed with an erotic aesthetic, the video reflects a pursuit towards sexual justice and autonomy for women living with HIV.

• Nixie, it’s giving

Through home videos, archival footage and fantasy landscapes, it’s giving explores the connection between caregiving for a child and caregiving for a dying community. What does it mean for an HIV+ person, who carries the history and present of the AIDS-crisis in their DNA, to foster new life?

• Vasilios Papapitsios, PARAPRONOIA

Papapitsios describes PARAPRONOIA as a “meditation on how we can(not) heal in the environments that make us sick, from the perspective of an infected neurodivergent faggot.” Combining auto-fiction with magical realism, Papapitsios humorously reimagines narratives around mental health and chronic illness.

For more information, visit visualaids.org.