Loss within Loss

Artists in the Age of AIDS

Edmund White, Edmund White

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780299170738
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

When an artist dies we face two great losses: the person and the work he did not live to do. Loss within Loss is a moving collaboration by some of America's most eloquent writers, who supply wry, raging, sorrowful, and buoyant accounts of artist friends and lovers struck down by AIDS. These essayists include Maya Angelou, Alan Gurganus, Brad Gooch, John Berendt, Craig Lucas, Robert Rosenblum, and eighteen others. Many of the subjects of the essays were already prominent—James Merrill, Paul Monette, David Wojnarowicz—but many others died young, before they were able to fulfil the promise of their lives and art. Loss within Loss spans all of the arts and includes portraits of choreographers, painters, poets, actors, playwrights, sculptors, editors, composers, and architects.

This landmark book is published in association with the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, a national organization that preserves art works created by artists living with HIV or lost to AIDS. Loss within Loss stands as a powerful reminder of the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic on the arts community and as the first real survey of that devastation. Though these accounts are often intensely sad, Loss within Loss is an invigorating, sometimes even exuberant, testimony to the sheer joy of being an artist... and being alive.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction: The American Sublime: Living and Dying as an Artist
• Through the Looking Glass
• After Peter
• Howard, Art, and the Seventies
• Where R U, John Crussell? Or, Inventing Humanity, One Play at a Time
• Self-Portrait with Rivals
• Corpses Dancing, Dancing Ghosts
• Who Turned Out the Limelight? : The Tragi-Comedy of Mark Morrisroe
• Robert Ferro
• Warren Sonbert
• Prodigal Son
• Chris DeBlasio
• Remembrance of Things Past: Marc Lida’s Proust Watercolors
• Trying to Find Words for Things Unspeakable
• Bruce Kelly, Landscape Architect
• Fucked
• Two Deaths, Two Lives
• Scott Burton
• Robert Farber
• Homage to Joe
• The Art of Losing
• James Merrill
• The Estate Project for Artists with AIDS
• Subject Biographies
• Contributor Biographies