Archiving an Epidemic

A much-needed publication on queer Chicanx art and artists in Southern California during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a study of loss, memory, and memorialization in the wake of the AIDS crisis...Hernandez’s work to reassemble the “wreckage” of AIDS art and performance allows us to imagine archival methods beyond institutions in performative and creative ways that look to infinite and speculative recastings of history for those the archive left behind. * Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture *
Hernández has created a methodology that is built from an understanding that archives are always flawed endeavors, especially given that so much art and performance created in response to AIDS has been lost or destroyed. Instead, he utilizes an approach that embraces degradation and incompletion. By meticulously attending to absences and failures in the work he studies, Hernández’s book offers an innovative new methodology for archival practice ... Hernández’s examination of queer Chicanx avantgarde practices is urgent and long overdue. * The Drama Review *
Provides a detailed, sensitive, and textured account of the precarious histories of queer Chicanx artists during the first decades of the ongoing AIDS crisis. This remarkable book offers new ways of thinking about how to reconstruct such histories by attending to the emotional and spatial qualities of the archives, homes, detritus, mementos, and memories that Hernández explores with the reader. While Archiving an Epidemic is a groundbreaking historical recovery of queer art in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s, it is also a reflection on loss, absence, silence, and the threat of erasure. Not only will this book be an essential text in the literatures on queer art, Chicanx art, and the AIDS pandemic, it should be read by anyone confronting archives and their limits. Indeed, no one studying American art and culture of the late twentieth century can afford not to read this book. -- David J. Getsy, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Hernández queers the archive while also stepping outside its institutional limits and into the realm of the absences and shards of human loss from AIDS. In doing so, Hernández develops an alternative methodology for 'queer detrital analysis' that brings the body and space to bear. A tour de force in its archival and critical breadth, this book vividly reimagines the American avant-garde since the 1960s through queer Chicanx artists, groups, and spaces in Southern California. -- Chon Noriega, University of California, Los Angeles