Loss within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS

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, Allan Gurganus, Brad Gooch, John Berendt, Craig Lucas, Robert Rosenblum, and seventeen 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 fulfill 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.