EVENTS  >>  8th Annual John Allen Blue Award December 2, 2004        PRESS RELEASE

7 Body Maps from South Africa were exhibited during the 8th Annual John Allen Blue Award. Below is an edited reprint from the Philadelphia Inquirer article documenting the Body Maps Project currently being exhibited at The Painted Bride. The full text version of this article is located at this link.

Life Lines - "Body Maps" is an exhibit of very personal art by South African women enduring with HIV - and hope.
By Annette John-Hall - Inquirer Staff Writer

The tracings started as just that. Sketches. Empty vessels, unfilled and unfulfilled, just like the hundreds of thousands of South African women who clung to the hope of survival before lifesaving antiretroviral drugs made survival more than a possibility.

The 21 Cape Town-area women who infused these drawings with vibrant color and poignant words also invested them with their dreams for a longer life. The tracings first became their stories, then pieces of artwork and ultimately "Body Maps," an exhibition of images by South African women living with HIV having its first U.S. showing at the Painted Bride Art Center.

"Body Maps" is made up of 11 butcher-paper originals and 10 digital reproductions on canvas, life-size mixed-media renderings that tell the story of each artist.

"Body Maps" is an offshoot of the University of Cape Town's Memory Box Project, in which HIV-positive participants - mostly women - handcrafted memory books and boxes for their children, anticipating their eventual deaths.

But what organizers discovered was that the participants were more interested in hope than dread. That they would rather speak of their futures than their pasts. In spite of the risk, a courageous band of volunteers emerged from this group willing to tell their personal stories - by painting a body map.

Working in pairs, one person traced her partner's body. The partner then sketched the tracer's body behind her. The completed outline depicts one body shadowing the other, symbolizing support.

The full body maps grew into a book called Long Life... Positive HIV Stories, and then into this exhibition.

The process of making these maps results in a kind of "support group," says Jennifer Lytton, director of special studies at Presbyterian Hospital in New York, who started a body-mapping project with HIV-positive women there.

In the United States, approximately 950,000 people are estimated to have HIV, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although the CDC's report showed that HIV diagnoses increased 17 percent among gay and bisexual men in the last four years, African American women accounted for half of the new cases.

In Philadelphia, 89.1 percent of all the newly diagnosed AIDS cases so far this year are African American or Latino.

In Africa, HIV infection is pandemic. In sub-Saharan Africa, 70 percent of all people live with HIV, and 57 percent are women.

Common threads emerge from the narratives: abuse, poverty and violence, all set in unsanitary environments. Common HIV ailments such as tuberculosis and shingles, a nerve-related skin disease, are often depicted by snakes and red blotches.

The maps convey that "nothing about this disease is particularly easy," Lytton says. "Just taking so many pills a day is quite difficult, physically and emotionally. They remind you you're dealing with an illness."

But no painting is totally bleak or altogether grim. Each one is embellished with hope in the form of rainbows, flowers and Bible verses. "Making this body map," writes a woman named Novangeli, "I was feeling all the time happy!"

  EVENTS  >>  8th Annual John Allen Blue Award December 2, 2004        PRESS RELEASE