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HIV/AIDS poster exhibit opens Sunday at Memorial Art Gallery

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University of Rochester’s AIDS Education Poster Collection

The interiors of Boston subway cars are not renowned for their artistic content. Dr. Edward Atwater had very likely never even given the idea much thought until one day in early 1990, while idly scanning the interior of the car he was riding.

His gaze landed on one of the posters advertising some sort of leisure product or public-service warning; the ones you forget about immediately after reaching your destination.

Yet one poster caught Atwater’s attention: a pair of disembodied hands opening a condom wrapper.

Subtle imagery aside, that ride in the Boston subway planted the seed for a passion that he would pursue throughout his retirement, right up until two weeks before his death in 2019 at age 93. Collecting AIDS education posters.

An exhibit built on Atwater’s collection -- as much as can fit on the walls – opens Sunday at Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery. “Up Against the Wall: Art, Activism, and the AIDS Poster” runs through June 19. Images that can be both amusing, through the clever use of fruit, and heartbreaking.

The show is in conjunction with a book of the same name that was published last summer by Rochester Institute of Technology’s RIT Press. The book presents nearly 200 posters culled from the UR collection.

Atwater’s collection grew to more than 8,000 images. And it continues to grow through this day, as part of a University of Rochester collection that may be the largest of its kind in the world.

Not all AIDS posters in the Edward Atwater collection were directed at gay relationships.
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University of Rochester’s AIDS Education Poster Collection
Not all AIDS posters were directed at gay relationships.

Mary Anne Mavrinac says she certainly hasn’t heard of any other collection approaching it.

Mavrinac was vice provost and the Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of the University of Rochester Libraries, until she retired at the end of last year. And she knew Atwater. Mavrinac recalls Atwater describing that subway revelation moment to her years later. Of how those hands made him think back to his time as a student at Harvard Medical School, when the lecture that day would be on the use of condoms as birth control, or to prevent the transmission of disease.

“The instructors actually closed the doors so that nobody could really hear that they were talking about this,” Mavrinac said last year of that conversation with Atwater, as she was in the midst of helping to prepare Atwater’s collection for the show. “And he thought: Oh my gosh, the world has totally changed. There are posters advertising safe sex.”

Atwater grew up in Batavia, was an infantryman in Europe during World War II, and spent most of his professional career at Strong Memorial Hospital and on the faculty at the medical school, practicing internal medicine and specializing in rheumatology.

And he was a Renaissance man. Before Harvard Medical School, he was a history major with a minor in comparative literature at UR. He published a book, “Women Medical Doctors in the United States Before the Civil War: A Biographical Dictionary.” Atwater served on the boards of groups such as The Landmark Society and The Friends of the University of Rochester Libraries. He gardened and traveled; he and his wife, Ruth, who died in 2017, visited Europe more than 20 times. They spent summers in Vermont and winters in St. John in the Virgin Islands. He collected books, drank good claret wines and enjoyed classical music, particularly on the pipe organ.

He collected stamps as a child, and in his later years moved on to rare books and ephemera of American popular medicine and health reform: Postcards, leaflets, condoms and clothing.

But it’s the poster collection that stands out, if only for its sheer volume. Posters from 131 countries, in 76 languages, according to Mavrinac. While traveling, Atwater would stop by a city’s public health service office, pick up posters and take them home on the plane. He wrote to health offices around the world, asking for AIDS posters. Even from Muslim countries, societies which Mavrinac described as less open about the epidemic.

Acquiring duplicate posters for his collection was inevitable; Atwater had about 6,000 extras. They were fuel for trade. As Mavrinac noted, “It was kind of like baseball cards at a certain point.”

Sunday’s exhibit opening will be accompanied by a 2 p.m. talk by Donald Albrecht, the exhibition guest curator and catalog co-editor. It will be offered in person, as well as virtually.

Jeff Spevak has been a Rochester arts reporter for nearly three decades, with seven first-place finishes in the Associated Press New York State Features Writing Awards while working for the Democrat and Chronicle.
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