Stan Walden

For my project, I designed and curated the exhibition AIDS at The New School: What Is Remembered? Through architectural experiments at the scale of furniture, I explore ways of displaying assets from The New School Archives and Special Collections that address this question. I invite unexpected encounters between exhibition visitors, who may alternate between collective and individual experiences as they move through the galleries.

The New School’s archives contain a robust, though by no means comprehensive, collection of artifacts that speak to the history of AIDS at The New School. For my project I also drew on the testimonies of witnesses, survivors, scholars, and artists at the university who help bring to life a period of crisis that has become abstract to many. Recordings of interviews with these people are to be played in the gallery and entered into the archives.

By displaying artifacts and playing testimonies, the exhibition situates this sprawling crisis in a specific place, using it as a means to challenge the discourses that shape our perception of the school, its neighborhood, and the city whose self-representation we too often take at face value.

This exhibition will take place in the Aronson Galleries at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center from November 2024 to January 2025.

stanwalden.studio