A collaboration with Christopher Paul Jordan for the exhibit Cell Count at La Mama La Galleria, New York. Cell Count brings together artists who grapple with the discursive and material histories that underpin HIV criminalization in order to unpack and re-configure the metaphors and assumptions that enable the punishment and incarceration of people living with HIV. Seeking to place HIV criminalization in a broader context, Cell Count suggests that these laws are not unique to the AIDS epidemic but instead echo a long history of medically sanctioned violence and incarceration in the United States. Drawing together 19th century experiments on enslaved women, the medicalization of homosexuality, and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study with the emergence of HIV-specific criminal statutes, Cell Count asks us to consider how medicine has been complicit with systems of surveillance and incarceration.
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two-sided letterpress poster