News :: GLBT
Medicine Wheel spinning toward World AIDS Day by Julie Tompkins
Bay Windows contributorTuesday Nov 24, 2009 The HIV/AIDS epidemic isn’t going away any time soon. Millions have been affected, either directly or indirectly, in America alone -- notably the country’s gay male population. In the developing world rates are even higher, and there is no end in sight. But none of this has deterred artistic director Michael Dowling and his staff from producing moving installations at the Boston Center for the Arts’s Cyclorama, 539 Tremont Street, for nearly two decades.
"At this point in the history of the epidemic, all of our lives have been affected -- we have lost loved ones, or support long-term survivors, or have come of age during the age of AIDS," said Dowling.
To raise awareness, Dowling each year creates an installation centered around an actual Medicine Wheel, which consists of 36 pedestals forming a circle. These pedestals act as shrines of sorts, as they contain mementos of lost loved ones: pictures, letters, walking sticks.
"It’s really a time capsule," said Nancy Kilburn, Development Coordinator at Medicine Wheel Productions.
This year’s installation, called Luminaria, is a 45-foot-wide lantern intersecting the Medicine Wheel.
"The concept of the Medicine Wheel is that we’re all on the wheel, all of human experience and all of human condition exists on the wheel," said Kilburn, who "cancelled everything" and spent hours at the Cyclorama after viewing the installation for the first time years ago.
From that day on she increased her participation in the project almost exponentially. "That concept lends itself well because there’s a way in which HIV/AIDS reflects the human condition as an epidemic, with love, passion, hope, pain, suffering, death. How do you become yourself and yet not succumb to death and despair and loss? And you can’t get away from those things either. A lot of that is really reflected in the disease."
For the past 18 years, Medicine Wheel Productions has honored A Day Without Art/World AIDS Day, Dec. 1, with a 24-hour vigil at the BCA. The vigil kicks off at midnight and during every hour there is at least one "artistic offering" by collaborating artists.
"There are a lot of people making offerings of their art, not as a performance, really just as an offering," said Kilburn. "It’s all about amping the art up as high as it can go."
Usually about 2,000 people attend throughout the course of the 24 hours, with large groups of as many as 300 or 400 at a time perusing the exhibit. Some stay for hours, and others even stay over night, camping out to pay their respects to fallen friends and family members.
"As an organization what we are about is nothing that has to do with the artistic commodity world that’s out there," said Kilburn. "It’s really art as an imitation, art as a response to the human condition, art that responds to the human need for art."
The project remains participatory after 19 years, and often involves people from various walks of life. A group of high-risk youth between the ages of 14 and 23, referred by the penal system, drug-treatment programs, and friends, do much of the actual artwork under Dowling’s supervision, while recovering addicts and wealthy homeowners pass through the wheel at the same time.
"It’s astounding how much the youth connect to the portraits -- they identify with the project through the pain in their lives," said Dowling.
The participatory portion of the installment drives Medicine Wheel’s success.
"A lot of artists understand intuitively how art allows you access to a deeper understanding," said Kilburn. "What we do is try to help the general person access that higher creative channeling of something and understanding something."
The exhibit, free for the public from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily, opened on Monday, Nov. 23, and will close for good at 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 2. A processional starting Nov. 30 at 11:30 p.m. from Eliot Norton Park (between Washington and Tremont streets near New England Medical Center) and ending at the Cyclorama will kick off the World AIDS Day vigil. The installation is closed on Thanksgiving.
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