Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
Theodore (Ted) Kerr contests dominant HIV/AIDS narratives as a strategy for reconsidering mainstream versions of the AIDS crisis, as well as how generally accepted histories of HIV/AIDS do not adequately attend to the contingent factors of race, class, and geographic location. The lenticular photo-collages Kerr collaboratively produced with filmmaker Jun Bae and social worker Shawn Torres for his series Rayford Home 1987 are extensions of Kerr’s research into the life and death of Robert Rayford, a black teenager in St. Louis who died of HIV-complications in 1969 as determined by medical research performed in 1987.
Rayford’s case has been overlooked for decades, with mainstream historians opting instead to begin their AIDS-timelines with the 1984 death of white, New York City-based flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas, falsely labeled “Patient Zero.” Kerr connects the erasure of Rayford from collective understandings of the AIDS crisis in America to the mass incarceration, criminalization, and death at the hands of police violence disproportionately endured by black individuals today. In his artwork, Kerr superimposes images related to Michael Brown (an unarmed 18-year-old killed by Police Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, MO, in 2014) and Michael Johnson (a 23-year-old criminalized, felony convicted, and sentenced by a Missouri court to over 30 years in prison for “recklessly” transmitting and exposing others to HIV) atop a found image of Rayford’s childhood home. (D.Orrendorf, Curator, 2017)