Publication: “Ed Aulerich-Sugai: Bodies to Grow Into, Images to Heal Into,” by Dylan Huw, Visual AIDS, New York, NY, January 2024.
The writer, curator and Visual AIDS Research Fellow Dylan Huw was commissioned in 2023 to research Aulerich-Sugai’s work. His essay, published online earlier this year by Visual AIDS places the artist’s work in a historical context. Huw describes Aulerich-Sugai’s work as “startling under-examined in scholarly, art-critical, and museological contexts,” and celebrates it as a visual chronicle of a person living with AIDS during the 1980s, the first decade of the epidemic.
In stark contrast with the highly politicized artwork of many of Aulerich-Sugai’s contemporaries, Huw’s essay presents a deep, empathic, and poetic understanding of the artist, “He produced some of the most thrillingly alive depictions of being an actual body being ravaged by the disease’s everyday onslaught of pain, fatigue, and confusion.”
Huw’s inclusion of Aulerich-Sugai’s own words about the importance of his art through HIV are powerful and surprising. In an interview, Aulerich- Sugai said, “These paintings were a way for me to make friends with and then control the virus on paper in hopes that it was also controlling the virus in me.”