Iceberg Projects is pleased to present selections from the Art+ Positive archives, curated by Dr. Daniel Berger and John Neff. The first exhibition of the group’s archive, this show initiates an ongoing project of research and study around the materials. 

A June 1989 Vanity Fair profile of Mark 
Kostabi included this quotation from the celebrity artist: These museum curators, that are for the most part homosexual, have controlled the art world in the eighties. Now they’re all dying of AIDS, and although I think it’s sad, I know it’s for the better. Because homosexual men are not actively participating in the perpetuation of human life.

Later that summer, in protest of Kostabi’s remarks and other instances of “homophobia, AIDSphobia, and censorship in the arts,” Art+ Positive organized as an affinity group of ACT UP / New York. 

Throughout its active life, Art+ Positive continued to focus on issues at the intersection of HIV/AIDS and the arts. After a letter-writing campaign against Kostabi and his supporters in the art world, the group went on to stage a series of street protests, including a significant action against the anti-N.E.A. Helms Amendment at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Additionally, they collaborated with dozens of artists to create two calendars—impeccably produced multiples presenting purpose-made artworks, esoteric factoids, and political messaging in wall calendar form—and the group exhibition An Army of Lovers: Combatting AIDS, Homophobia, and Censorship at New York’s P.S. 122. 

Art+ Positive disbanded in 1991, although co-founding members Aldo Hernandez and Hunter Reynolds resurrected the collective in 2010 to protest the National Portrait Gallery’s removal of member David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly from the exhibition Hide and Seek: Desire and Difference in American Portraiture. Since then, Art+ Positive has maintained an active presence on Facebook, often posting archival images from their early years on the group’s page. 

Art+ Positive members included Dennis Davidson, Bill Dobbs, Lola Flash, Catherine Gund, Aldo Hernandez, Leon (Tracy) Mostovoy, Robin Murphy, Ray Navarro, Hunter Reynolds, Jody Rhone, Julie Tolentino, and David Wojnarowicz. Collaborating artists also represented in the archive include Donna Binder, David Bradshaw, Ana De Orbegoso, Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe, Diviana Ingravallo, Zoe Leonard, Anthony Viti and Michael Wakefield. 

Iceberg’s exhibition will include artworks and a rotating display of documents, ephemera, and protest signage from Art+ Positive. A workstation in the gallery will be used in cataloging and digitizing the archive during the run of the show.

Equipped, created by Ray Navarro with assistance from Zoe Leonard, will be among the artworks exhibited. An image-text triptych in artist-designed frames, Equipped slyly mobilizes references to queer sex, HIV/AIDS medicine and censored speech. It was included in the 1990 exhibition An Army of Lovers, which opened shortly after Navarro’s death. The elements of a large collage installation by David Wojnarowicz, also shown in the P.S. 122 exhibit before being dispersed into different collections, will be brought together at Iceberg for the first time in 25 years.