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Richard Hayes
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Voices from Richmond’s Hidden Epidemic, a new exhibition opening on January 23, will feature oral histories and black-and-white photographic portraits, focusing on the personal stories of those affected by HIV/AIDS in Richmond.
Richmond’s rate of HIV infection, currently ranked 19th nationally, is exacerbated by high concentrations of poverty, lack of sex education in public schools and the continuing opioid epidemic. Despite years of medical and social progress, misconceptions about HIV/AIDS persist today.
Bill Martin & Eric Steigleder
The Valentine
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In the inaugural episode of Richmond Stories, Bill Martin and Eric Steigleder sit down with Laura Browder and Patricia Herrera of the University of Richmond and advocate Deidre Johnson to talk about the Valentine’s new exhibition Voices from Richmond’s Hidden Epidemic, Richmond’s ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis, racial disparities and the importance of telling your own story on your own terms.
Andrew Roberts
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Voices from Richmond’s Hidden Epidemic, a new exhibition opening on January 23, will feature oral histories and black-and-white photographic portraits, focusing on the personal stories of those affected by HIV/AIDS in Richmond.
Richmond’s rate of HIV infection, currently ranked 19th nationally, is exacerbated by high concentrations of poverty, lack of sex education in public schools and the continuing opioid epidemic. Despite years of medical and social progress, misconceptions about HIV/AIDS persist today.
Sabrina Moreno
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In the nook of a chapel within St. Paul’s Baptist Church, Lindsay Bryant is talking about the silicone model of a penis she has in the trunk of her car.
“Yes! And with condoms. I got a bunch, you need any?”
Willnette Cunningham, a former postal worker, AIDS survivor and fellow HIV-awareness activist who’s known Bryant since high school, breaks out laughing before saying to always check the expiration date. It’s in the crease of the opening.
There’s a model of a vagina, too, but Cunningham hasn’t seen that one.
This conversation isn’t uncommon within these walls. It’s been 25 years since a group within the church including Bryant and the Rev. Eric King—then called the AIDS awareness prevention ministry—penned a letter to the Rev. Lance Watson asking if he could do a sermon around compassion and love. of those affected by HIV/AIDS in Richmond.
Harry Kollatz
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A New Exhibition Offers Perspective on HIV/AIDS in Richmond of those affected by HIV/AIDS in Richmond.
The continued persistence and pervasiveness of HIV/AIDS is the subject of Voices From Richmond’s Hidden Epidemic, an exhibition running from Jan. 23 to May 25 at The Valentine. In it, 30 individuals — those with the illness and those who treat or have cared for them — are given expression, accompanied by large-format black-and-white portraits by Michael Simon.
Dina Weinstein
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In a photograph of Federico Xol, the mustachioed Guatemala-born man stands in the middle of the frame staring into the camera without smiling.
Xol is positioned on the shoulder of a road with Jefferson Davis Highway and Chippenham Parkway signs slightly blurred in the background. It is not an elegant setting. A viewer feels nervous about Xol's safety given the potential for speeding traffic.
The photograph is part of the Valentine museum's new exhibit, Nuestras Historias: Latinos in Richmond, which documents the region›s diverse Latino experiences. After listening to Xol tell his story in Spanish, which plays continually, it becomes clear that this spot is significant because it was his first encounter with Richmond. This was the place where he met his brother after descending from a bus, following a long journey atop the infamous Bestia, or Beast train, which thousands of Central Americans precariously ride through Mexico on their way to the United States. He made the dangerous journey because of conflict in his homeland.
Tina Griego
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I am Latina. According the U.S. Census Bureau, the term denotes my ethnic origin and not my race, which, my grandparents would insist, is white. But that government definition is a matter of contention among Latinos, most of whom shrug it aside to embrace Latino as both a race and an ethnicity.
“Latino” is an umbrella term; beneath its canopy are the citizens of 21 Spanish-speaking nations. This culturally cacophonous clumping together, too, is a matter of contention within the group and it has been for, oh, I don’t know, forever—because a Puerto Rican is not a Dominican and a Mexican is not an El Salvadoran.
Catherine Komp
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A new exhibit at the Valentine Richmond History Center explores the changing identity of Church Hill, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods. As Catherine Komp reports for Virginia Currents, the exhibit was created through a unique collaboration between students, residents, artists and educators.
Laura Browder & Patricia Herrera
Volume 23, Issue No. 1
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In 2010, we launched a five-year project The Fight for Knowledge: Civil Rights and Education in Richmond at the University of Richmond. The center of this endeavor is a documentary theater course, Civil Rights and Education in Richmond: A Documentary Theater Project, that each year focuses on a different aspect of educational history in Richmond.' The first year we researched and performed a play that offered an overview of segregation, desegregation, and resegregation in the city's public schools. Struck by the stories of two white alums of George Wythe, a high school that had undergone major transformations in the past several decades, in the second year of our class we took a more focused approach and addressed a single year—1974–1975, the year that busing began.
Laura Browder & Patricia Herrera
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A couple of years ago, as we were putting together a documentary theater course on civil rights and education in Richmond, we got to know a local man named Mark Person, whose name we had run across in a book about school desegregation in Richmond, The Color of Our Skin (Pratt 1993). Mark, who is white, told us a story about how his family came to own Nat Turner's bible, after Turner had been baptized in the millpond of the Person United Methodist Church, a family church Mark still attends. For Mark, this bible was more than a historical artifact—it was a metaphor for how he thinks about the history of race in America. Mark was on the verge of sharing this family treasure with a wider audience as a way, perhaps, of inspiring dialogue about the relationships between whites and blacks. Through his tireless efforts to interest community members in our project, Mark became instrumental in the success of our documentary theater production. More than that, he offered us a new way to think about archives—not just as repositories but also as active agents in the process of creating a dialogic community history of civil rights in our city.