REVIEW
How AIDS changed American art: Tacoma Art Museum show charts responses to the HIV crisis
By Michael Upchurch
October 18, 2015
Brett Reichman, And the Spell Was Broken Somewhere Over the Rainbow, oil on canvas, 1992
“Arts AIDS America,” a moving new show at the Tacoma Art Museum, charts cultural responses to the HIV crisis — beginning with an artist’s 1981 rendering of Kaposi sarcoma lesions before anyone had realized their significance.
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Artists used every possible medium to wrestle with the plague that had so unexpectedly descended upon them. (Remember: This generation grew up thinking it lived in an infection-curable world, thanks to antibiotics and vaccination programs — a notion that AIDS turned on its head.) Seattle painter Michael Ehle’s gouache on rice paper, “Fakir,” and Brett Reichman’s oil on canvas, “And the Spell Was Broken Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” both from 1992, are low-key heartbreakers.
“Fakir” was a response to the endless doctors’ needle pricks Ehle endured during his treatments for AIDS. Reichman’s swinging, rainbow-hued clocks in “Spell Was Broken” have something of the demolition ball about them.