Brilliant New Essay Featuring Jerome Caja

Thank you Glen Helfand!

I want to give a special thank you to Glen, who is one of the advisors on The Jerome Project. He has written the insightful essay, "Art AIDS SF: Tales of the City," which is published in the catalog for the "Art AIDS America" show. Glen has a deep understanding of Jerome's place in San Francisco and in contemporary American art. It is an honor to work with him. He has given us golden advice on structuring Jerome's life story in the film.

Here is an excerpt from Glen's essay in the Art AIDS America catalog featuring Jerome Caja:

"In the context of Art AIDS America, at one end of the spectrum is Nayland Blake, whose work is cerebral, playful, and at times arcane, but notably attuned to the metaphorical and actual effects of HIV/AIDS on the city's psyche; on the other is Jerome Caja, whose fetish paintings of scary clowns and skinny drag queens rendered in nail polish are intuitive and dreamlike, evoking a scene out of an eroticized Hieronymus Bosch painting but with figures dressed in ripped fishnets and ornamented with crudely rendered Happy Faces. The works of many other artists can be located at various points between these intellectualized and expressionistic impulses."

University of Washington Press
Art AIDS America by Jonathan Katz and Rock Hushka
$45.00 Hardcover (ISBN 978-0-295-99494-9)
Published: December 2015
Subject Listing: Art History ; Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Bibliographic information: 288 pp., 200 color illus., 8.25 x 10.5 in.
Published with: Tacoma Art Museum

by Anthony Cianciolo