I've Got U Under My Skin: AIDS & Classical Music

Artists have always enriched the world through their work, even when confronted with great suffering, loss, and fear. With the pervasiveness of AIDS at the end of the twentieth century, how did musicians respond to that epidemic through their music?

About

One thing is certain with age: the accumulation of personal history. Some of it you may want to forget. Some of it you can’t help but forget. And some of it you should never forget. For those of us old enough to have lived a part of our adult lives through the 1980s and 90s, the AIDS crisis falls into the latter category.

Kevin Madill

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Events

Locations

Curator

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  Kevin Madill

  Music Librarian

  Kevin Madill is Music Librarian at the University of British Columbia. He was born in Ottawa, Ontario in 1955 and spent his formative years living in small towns and on army bases scattered across rural Canada. He holds a Master of Library and Information Studies degree from UBC, a BMus (Honors, Theory and Composition) from Western University, as well as an MFA and a BFA from UBC. Previous positions include library administrator, library manager, and liaison/collections librarian in academic and special libraries in the United States and Canada including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. Along with his role as Music Librarian at UBC, Kevin has served as Adjunct Faculty with the UBC iSchool where he taught library collection management (2017-19) and as Elected Representative of Professional Librarians on UBC Senate (2015-19). Kevin is active in the cultural realm as both writer and visual artist. He is the author of the exhibition’s accompanying article, I’ve Got U Under My Skin: AIDS and Classical Music, published in Imaginations, a multilingual, open-access journal of international visual cultural studies. His photomurals explore the interconnectedness of modernity, personal identity, and portraiture and are held by several museums in the Pacific Northwest. A collection of his work is available for online viewing through the solo exhibition Vancouver Modern: on the limits of portraiture.

Organizers

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  Laura Bisaillon

  Associate Professor

  Laura Bisaillon is a sociologist and associate professor who joined the University of Toronto in 2013 following postdoctoral fellowships at McGill University (Biomedical Ethics) and York University (Sociology). She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Ottawa in 2012. Her dissertation about HIV-related practices in the Canadian immigration system, which was awarded a Governor General’s Gold Medal, was informed by her prior decade-long career as care provider among women refugees in Djibouti and Ethiopia and in AIDS service organizations in Montreal, where she is from. She has served on the boards of the Canadian AIDS Treatment and Information Exchange, AIDS Community Care Montreal, and the HIV and AIDS Legal Clinic Ontario. In these milieus, she socialized with people from around the world who sought refuge in Canada, as they navigated the complicated and hard to understand refugee adjudication and immigration systems. These experiences led her to develop a scholarly research program investigating and making visible the inner workings of state bureaucracies through their medical, legal, and administrative practices from the standpoint of the very people toward whom exclusionary policy, law and practices are directed. From this line of inquiry emerged the award-winning book Screening Out (2022), the documentary film The Unmaking of Medical Inadmissibility (2020), and the project Medical Exclusion.

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  Janneka Guise

  Director, Music Library

  Janneka Guise joined the University of Toronto Music Library as Head Librarian in 2017. She has worked in academic libraries in Canada and the United States since 1999. Prior to her move to Toronto, she was Head of the Eckhardt-Gramatté Music Library at the University of Manitoba for ten years. She holds Masters degrees in Music Theory (Western) and Library and Information Studies (Alberta), and a Graduate Professional Certificate in Library Sector Leadership (Victoria). She has published extensively and is currently co-lead editor of the open access, peer reviewed journal CAML Review. In 2015 she published Succession Planning in Canadian Academic Libraries (Chandos) and this year she co-authored a peer-reviewed paper with U of T colleagues on music score collection assessment for the forthcoming issue of Fontes Artis Musicae. In July 2023, she will begin a one-year research leave to research and write the history of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (CAML).

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  Saša Rajšić

  Coordinator, Integrated Arts Education

  Saša Rajšić (he/him/his) joined Hart House in 2022 as Coordinator, Integrated Arts Education. He creates and manages arts education programming initiatives focused on experiential learning, and serves as staff advisor to student leaders on the Hart House Student Arts Committee in delivering their annual programs. Saša has held previous roles at Blackwood Gallery and Cambridge Art Galleries, and studied at OCAD University and Uniarts Helsinki. As a former refugee, he is committed to reconciliation, human rights, community, learning, and the environment.

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