HOME MOVIE FILMMAKER IRA SACHS ’ S 2010 documentary short, Last Address, presents a look at a set of creative individuals who’ve been lost to AIDS. In roughly eight minutes of footage, the film moves from street view to street view of 20-plus New York City houses and apartment buildings where artists, writers, and performers lived when they died—their last address. Yet with little more than the ambient sounds of the city and the names and addresses of the lost superimposed on frames, the film is riveting. Among the sites visited are the former homes of Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, Vito Russo, David Wojnarowicz, Assotto Saint, and Reinaldo Arenas. With all of the individuals whose homes are shown having died from 1983 to 2007, Sachs has memorialized in a quiet, beautiful way, as he describes it, “the disappearance of a generation.”
Last Address, 2010: The documentary short by filmmaker Ira Sachs (at right) visits the final homes in New York City of a generation of famed creative individuals who died of AIDSrelated complications.
LIVING ON
LEGAL AID
part of the Alliance for the Arts, works to not only preserve and document a variety of works of art—visual, film and video, musical scores, dances, and manuscripts—by HIV-positive artists as a cultural legacy of the AIDS crisis but also to provide financial planning to artists. The organization is currently working on projects that include an iniative for preserving works associated with live theater performances as well as creating a National Registry of Artists With AIDS.
THROUGH WHAT IT CALLS
THE ESTATE PROJECT FOR ARTISTS WITH AIDS
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the “intersection of advocacy, art, community, and spirit,” the HIV Law Project has been holding an annual exhibition and silent auction of works of contemporary artists in order to raise money to help the agency provide service to disadvantaged and low-income HIVers. At this year’s event, to be held November 4, there will be 18 works of art up for auction.