AIDS Timeline

<p>Group Material’s work was primarily topical and temporal, fueled by our personal and collective observations—and by the social urgencies we perceived. Our horizon was the present tense. In 1989, the curator of the MATRIX Gallery at the Berkeley University Art Museum, Larry Rinder, invited us to address the subject of AIDS after seeing our exhibition at Dia Art Foundation the year before, “AIDS & Democracy: A Case Study.”</p> <p>At the time, Group Material consisted of Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Karen Ramspacher. By 1989, we had witnessed several years of the epidemic with severely inadequate public response.The accumulation of AIDS-related illnesses and deaths of young friends and colleagues informed our daily lives. For our own edification and for public purpose, the group embarked on constructing a history of the conditions that had trans- formed the epidemic into a full-blown national crisis…</p>