The Utah Museum of Fine Arts is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2025 by presenting Meet Us Where We’re At, a program of six videos that forefront the experiences of drug users and harm reduction practices as they intersect with the ongoing HIV crisis. This free event at the UMFA will include film screenings, community conversation, postcard writing, and tasty snacks! All are welcome, and we hope you’ll join us for a Day With(out) Art.
Agenda
5-6 pm | Visit the Global Contemporary Gallery to engage with "Félix González-Torres’s Untitled (L.A.)" adjacent to a work of art covered to honor World AIDS Day. Light refreshments, postcard-writing, community tabling in the Great Hall.
6-8 pm | Film screenings and community panel in the Dumke Auditorium (postcard writing and refreshments continue in the Great Hall)
"Meet Us Where We’re At…" will feature newly commissioned videos by Kenneth Idongesit Usoro (Nigeria), Hoàng Thái Anh (Vietnam), Gustavo Vinagre & Vinicius Couto (Brazil/Portugal), Camilo Tapia Flores (Chile/Brazil), Camila Flores-Fernández (Peru/Germany), and José Luis Cortés (Puerto Rico).
Commissioned videos by artists in Puerto Rico, Brazil, Nigeria, Germany, and Vietnam journey across a range of spaces revealing the complexity of drug use. Several videos document the visible world of drugs—a harm reduction program in a Berlin park, a night out during Rio’s Carnival—while others reveal private, often hidden spaces where safety is found: bedrooms, underground clinics, and moments of connection between lovers.
Meet Us Where We’re At speaks not only to the variety of physical locations where contemporary harm reduction is practiced, but also to a broader shift: centering drug users as authors of their own experiences. Rooted in the philosophy of meeting people at their personal reality without judgment, the program affirms the full context of drug use—its pleasures, its risks, and its role in how people survive, care, and connect.
Harm reduction has long been central to the AIDS movement through practices like needle exchange and safe injection sites, and people who use drugs have been affected by HIV since the earliest days of the epidemic. This program brings their perspectives to the forefront, amplifying the voices of drug users as storytellers, cultural producers, and essential participants in the global response to HIV.
Visual AIDS is a New York-based non-profit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.
Learn more at https://umfa.utah.edu/event/day-without-art-2025/
Header Image: José Luis Cortés, ¿Por qué tanto dolor? (Why So Much Pain?), 2025. Commissioned by Visual AIDS for Meet Us Where We’re At.
Event Venue
410 Campus Center Dr, Salt Lake City, UT, United States, Utah 84112
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.
