For this year’s Day With(out) Art program, nonprofit Visual AIDS commissioned artists to create five short videos that explore the connections between HIV and other illnesses and disabilities. Titled Everyone I Know Is Sick, the program will premiere at museums, universities and other organizations on or around World AIDS Day, marked Friday, December 1.

The Day With(out) Art 2023 program premiers at New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art at 7 p.m., Thursday, November 30, and the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Renberg Theatre at 7 p.m., Monday, December 4. You can find a full list of screening locations across the globe on VisualAIDS.org.

Don’t fret if you can’t make it to a theater; you can watch the program from the comfort of your own couch when it’s streamed beginning December 1 on VisualAIDS.org/dwa2023. You can also watch a trailer for the program at the top of this article.

For this year’s program, Visual AIDS commissioned five short videos from artists across the globe. The lineup includes:

  • Dorothy Cheung (Hong Kong),

  • Hiura Fernandes & Lili Nascimento (Brazil),

  • Beau Gomez (Canada/Philippines),

  • Dolissa Medina & Ananias P. Soria (USA), and

  • Kurt Weston (USA).

Visual AIDS describes the Day With(out) Art 2023 program:

“Inspired by a statement from Cyrée Jarelle Johnson in the book Black Futures, Everyone I Know Is Sick examines how our society excludes disabled and sick people by upholding a false dichotomy of health and sickness.

“Inviting us to understand disability as a common experience rather than an exception to the norm, the program highlights a range of experiences spanning HIV, COVID, mental health, and aging. The commissioned artists foreground the knowledge and expertise of disabled and sick people in a world still grappling with multiple ongoing pandemics.”

The Visual AIDS event debuted in 1989. Originally titled Day Without Art, it invited galleries and museums to cover up art—or to close and send staff to volunteer at AIDS organizations. The overall objective, then and today, remains to use art to mark losses, raise awareness and to call people to action. On its 10th anniversary, Day Without Art became Day With(out) Art, adding the parentheses to highlight a shift in the program to include art being created—not just covered up—as a way to raise awareness about both the epidemic and artists living with the virus.