NLM Traveling Exhibit: April 8 – May 18, 2024

Join us at the Health Sciences Library for the traveling National Library of Medicine (NLM) exhibit: AIDS, Posters & Stories of Public Health: A People's History of a Pandemic.

This exhibition explores how AIDS posters serve as highly adaptable, durable, cost effective, efficient tools in sharing public health messaging. Created by communities bonded together by illness and a desire to make change, these posters provide a gateway to AIDS history, illustrating how, in the face of illness, neglect, and, early on, the unknown, people came together to connect, create, and save one another's lives. Today, AIDS posters continue to be valuable resources for the ongoing epidemic. They teach us about community organizing processes and the ways that groups dealing with HIV heal, share fears, and strategize toward wellness together.

Located on the 2nd floor of our library, you may also check out any of the books on display with this exhibit by visiting the Information Desk on the 3rd floor.

A sampling of print books on display:

  Visual Strategies Against AIDS: International AIDS Prevention Posters (2002).

  It was Vulgar & It was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists used Art to Fight a Pandemic (2022).

  After Silence: A History of AIDS through its Images (2018).

Online Resources:

  Imagining Illness Public Health and Visual Culture (2010, eBook). From seventeenth-century broadsides about the handling of dead bodies, printed during London's plague years, to YouTube videos about preventing the transmission of STDs, public health advocacy and education has always had a powerful visual component.

Up Against the Wall: Art, Activism and the AIDS Poster (2021, eBook). The AIDS Education Posters Collection consists of more than 8,000 posters from 130 countries, in 76 languages and counting.

   University of Technology, Jamaica's Graffiti Wall: Increasing Awareness of HIV/AIDS through Participatory Message Design (2004, Caribbean Quarterly article). As part of an HIV/AIDS exhibition held on the campus, the University mounted a Graffiti Competition, inviting staff and students to develop positive messages about strategies to combat HIV/AIDS.

Love Your Asian Body: AIDS Activism in Los Angeles (2021, eBook). A community memoir, Love Your Asian Body connects the deeply personal with the uncompromisingly political in telling the stories of more than thirty Asian American AIDS activists...

To learn more about this exhibition and upcoming accompanying events, look to our Health Sciences Displays guide.