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LOCAL>> Jack Lowery – It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful

Presented by Copperfield's Books – San Rafael at Streaming Arts

Jun 23 2022
LOCAL>> Jack Lowery – It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful

Author/teacher discusses his book about the activist art collective with poet/curator

In conversation with James J. Siegel

Featured Book: It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful

Join us for a virtual Evening With Pride featuring Jack Lowery in conversation with local author, James J. Siegel.

The story of art collective Gran Fury—which fought back during the AIDS crisis through direct action and community-made propaganda—offers lessons in love and grief.

In the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was annihilating queer people, intravenous drug users, and communities of color in America, and disinformation about the disease ran rampant.

Out of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an art collective that called itself Gran Fury formed to campaign against corporate greed, government inaction, stigma, and public indifference to the epidemic.

Writer Jack Lowery examines Gran Fury’s art and activism from iconic images like the “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster to the act of dropping piles of fake bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Lowery offers a complex, moving portrait of a collective and its members, who built essential solidarities with each other and whose lives evidenced the profound trauma of enduring the AIDS crisis.

Gran Fury and ACT UP’s strategies are still used frequently by the activists leading contemporary movements. In an era when structural violence and the devastation of COVID-19 continue to target the most vulnerable, this belief in the power of public art and action persists.

 

Jack Lowery is a writer and teacher, whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement and The Awl. He completed his MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Columbia University, and has taught in the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University. As an editor, he has published the poetry of David Wojnarowicz. He lives in Brooklyn.

James J. Siegel is the author of the poetry collection, The God of San Francisco,” published by Sibling Rivalry Press. He is the host and curator of the monthly Literary Speakeasy show at Martuni’s piano bar is San Francisco. Originally from Toledo, Ohio, his first poetry collection, “How Ghosts Travel,” was a finalist for an Ohioana Book Award. He was a scholarship recipient to the Antioch Writers’ Workshop and his poems have been featured in a number of journals including The Cortland Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, HIV Here & Now, The Good Men Project, and more.

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Free Online Admission – register for Zoom link

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6:00 pm

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