In 1991, days before World AIDS Day, which is honored each year on Dec. 1, Jim Buresch headed to his local crafts store in Huntington, West Virginia.
He had a mission: oak tag and popsicle sticks. When he got home, he used the supplies to fashion mock gravestones.
His partner, Dennis, had died from AIDS just two weeks earlier; the year before, Buresch found out he was also HIV-positive. He was angry. He was scared. He was only 23.
In the early morning hours of Dec. 1, 1991, while it was still dark, he quietly got to work at Marshall University, the college he attended. He planted 300 of these paper tombstones into the ground of the campus quad, “in neat little rows, just like Arlington National Cemetery,” he said. Each one represented a local life lost to AIDS that year.
He was part of the Huntington AIDS Task Force, which organized a candlelight march for that evening. But that wasn’t enough for Buresch.
“I felt it didn’t express me,” he said. “I was really angry … I was just lashing out, trying to let the world know what kind of pain I was in. I couldn’t deal with it anymore. Too many of my friends were dying.”
Now, more than 20 years later, the anger has mostly given way to acceptance. But he still strives to raise awareness of the AIDS pandemic.
This year, he’s bringing his grand artistic vision to the streets of St. Petersburg — literally. Buresch is behind the Rock It Red! St. Pete campaign, which will turn a stretch of Central Avenue in the Grand Central District — from 16th to 31st streets — into a temporary public arts installation.
The project calls for wrapping 172 trees with fabric, creating a conceptual 1.25-mile long red ribbon to honor World AIDS Day. The work will be installed on Saturday, Nov. 29, with the help of volunteers, and will remain up until Tuesday, Dec. 2, Buresch said. He hopes the piece will get passersby talking and will challenge their assumptions about HIV and AIDS.
“I want it to provoke thought and dialogue,” he said. “That’s what art is all about, right? I think it’s mammoth enough that anyone who sees it is going to wonder what it’s all about.”
Additionally, visitors viewing the installation will be able to use fabric pens to write the names of loved ones who have died from the disease and personal messages of hope on the wraps of at least 50 trees.
After the installation comes down, Buresch will sew the wraps together to create one long piece or possibly several longer pieces that may be put on display somewhere in the community. He plans to approach Pinellas County Schools about using it as an educational tool, and is in talks with the Florida Holocaust Museum about displaying a portion of the installation there. He also envisions another piece of it displayed in Metro Wellness and Community Centers’ new LGBT Welcome Center in St. Pete.
Buresch also encourages business and organizations to go red for World AIDS Day by using colored streamers, balloons, lighting and other decorative touches. Individuals can do the same by wearing red or even swapping out regular light bulbs at home for those with a red tint, he said.
The St. Petersburg Arts Alliance is the umbrella organization for the project and will be handling all donations, he said. Anything raised beyond the $1,500 budget will be split between the alliance and the welcome center.
Most of the money has come from his friends and family, so far. But a number of local organizations, including Creative Loafing and Florida Print Solutions, have offered in-kind donations. Bank of America is sending over 20 volunteers to help set up the installation.
A candlelight vigil will be held at the Welcome Center, located at 2227 Central Ave., at 6:30 p.m. on Dec. 1. This will be followed by an 8 p.m. production of As Is at American Stage Theatre Company, presented by the Suncoast AIDS Theatre Project. All funds raised will benefit Metro Wellness’s AIDS programs.
“All three projects are working together for cross-promotion,” he said.
Activism and art have always gone hand-in-hand for Buresch.
While working as an IT professional for companies such as Wells Fargo and Netscape in San Francisco in the late 1990s, he also volunteered with ACT UP, the groundbreaking HIV/AIDS organization.
He also grew outraged by the gentrification of the city’s infamous Castro District, watching as the cost of living — particularly the cost of rent — rose rapidly in the diverse, gay-friendly neighborhood. An apartment that he rented for $800 a month in the late 1990s was on the market for $3,000 monthly a decade later, he said.
Before Buresch left the other Bay area, he again turned to art to express his frustration. On the side of a five-story building in the Castro District, he unfurled a giant sign emblazoned with a large pink triangle and the words “Keep the Castro Queer.” The image later made its way onto postcards and t-shirts.
“When I say queer, it’s not about who you sleep with, and not about who you love,” he said. “Queer is a state of mind, something a little odd, something a little different.”
He’s bounced around since then, making his way to Palm Beach, where he bought a home and took a job working for the city’s openly gay mayor Ron Oden.
But a crystal meth addiction, which crept up on him quickly, derailed his life.
“It was only one or two years, but I lost everything. I lost my home. I lost my job. I lost my partner,” he said. “I lost it all. The damage [the drugs did], it takes a while to rebuild your life.”
Buresch entered the Pride Institute’s rehab program in Fort Lauderdale and remained in the area when he got out.
The first thing he did was head to the art supplies store.
“I dropped a couple grand [there],” he said. “By the time I came up for air, it was one year later.”
During that period, he painted nearly 50 abstract paintings that were “really well-received,” he said. Many of them were purchased, and he picked up several awards for his work.
But he decided he wanted to try to reclaim his IT career and headed to Seattle. What he didn’t realize was that the field had changed significantly.
“It was in the middle of a boom. Nineteen-year-olds just out of college couldn’t find a job,” he said. “Forget someone who’s been out of the field for a decade. It didn’t go well.”
So Buresch reevaluated his life.
“I asked myself, ‘What makes me happy?’ I’ve had HIV for 24 years now,” he said. “As much as I don’t want to admit it, I’m disabled. The drugs [I’m prescribed] have taken their toll physically. So really, what makes me happy?”
Two periods of his life came to mind: when he volunteered for ACT UP in San Francisco and when he focused on his artwork in
Fort Lauderdale.
“Activism and creating,” he said. “That’s what makes me happy.”
Intent on combining the two, he landed in St. Petersburg a little over a year ago. The Rock It Red! campaign is his first installation, and it won’t be his last.
“This has opened up Pandora’s Box for me,” Buresch said.
He’s already working on an installation for Earth Day, April 22, 2015. He plans to launch hundreds of mini, 45" high sailboats made of balsa wood with fabric sails into the bay. Equipped with LED lights, at night, they’ll light up the waterfront, creating a visual display that will be difficult to miss. He hopes to call attention not only to Earth Day, but to the city’s new universal, curbside recycling program.
“We take our waterfront for granted just like we take Earth Day for granted,” he said.
He also is planning another gravestones installation for Mother’s Day that will make a statement about teen suicides.
“That will be a nice wake-up call,” he said.
Buresch also said next year’s World AIDS Day installation will be even bigger and better than this year’s project: He’s going to construct a Labyrinth of AIDS.
He’ll make six-foot-tall red walls to build the labyrinth, which will have many points of entry. Each entry will be a different journey, telling the story of AIDS from a different perspective – an African, a gay man, a straight person — and using artwork from local artists along the way.
It will actually be a hybrid of a labyrinth, which “guides you through self-reflection,” he said, and a maze, which “is meant to confuse you, turn you around.”
The four stories will come together at the center of the labyrinth, which he envisions as a space for hope and dialogue.
“I’m just lending my voice to the choir” through these large-scale installations, Buresch said. “I’m still being an advocate. I’m still screaming at the top of my lungs, but now with more of an operatic force.”
HIV/AIDS in FL
Florida continues to rank high among the states most heavily impacted by the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
According to the Florida Department of Health, in 2012 approximately 130,000 Florida residents were living with HIV. That same year, the state was third in the nation in the cumulative number of AIDS cases (128,845, behind only New York and California) and second in the nation in the number of newly diagnosed HIV infection cases (5,100, behind only California).
Based on that same data, the FDH found that of those living with HIV, 49 percent are black, 29 percent are white and 20 percent are Hispanic. Seventy percent of those with HIV are male, and people 45 and older represent 60 percent of HIV cases.
Hillsborough County was one of the five Florida counties reporting the highest number of HIV cases (coming in fifth, with 403 new cases reported) and the highest number of AIDS cases (coming in fourth, with 231 new cases) in 2013. Miami-Dade County topped both lists. (Pinellas was not in the top five on either.)
Additionally, all six of Florida’s large metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) reported more HIV cases individually than many states as a whole in 2012. That year, Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater reported 574 cases, more than Missouri, which ranked 20th among all the states in new HIV cases with 558.
This article appears in Nov 20-26, 2014.