To honor the legacy of the late poet, advocate, author, singer and young person living with AIDS, Mary Bowman, and support other accomplished young art activists like her, the National AIDS Memorial offers the Mary Bowman Arts in Activism Award to student and non-student art activists. This program is intended to support two young art activists (27 years of age or younger) with $5,000 awards each year who exemplify Mary’s passion for the arts as the vehicle for their own HIV/AIDS and/or health, social, and/or racial justice community activism and expression. In general, art activism ("artivism") harnesses the critical imagination to design events and strategies that provoke new questions and new meaning in pursuit of more respectful ways of being. As an example, with respect to HIV/AIDS, such artistic statements are frequently borne from a variety of perspectives in terms of gender, sexuality, age, class, ethnicity, and nationality, and wield artistic expression as a tool for combating stigma. Stigma, and all it entails—shame, isolation, embarrassment, exclusion, shunning—remains among the most formidable barriers to fighting the epidemic.
The Mary Bowman Arts in Activism Award online application opens on March 1, 2023 at the website provided below.
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