Mary Fisher Exhibition Abataka at RIT’s Bevier Gallery

Artist/activist remains America’s symbol of hope in battling AIDS

MEDIA/PHOTO OPPORTUNITIES Mary Fisher is available for interviews.

Many years ago I said that my role as a member of the worldwide AIDS community needed to be defined never as a victim and always as a messenger. I hope this exhibit (Abataka) gives voice to messages that attract you, hold you, and perhaps disturb you into awareness and action. —Mary Fisher

Mary Fisher seemed to have it all. Raised in a socially prominent family, she became an artist, photographer, former advance woman for President Gerald Ford, television producer and a mother of two sons. When her world fell apart after learning she had contracted AIDS from her ex-husband, Fisher spoke at the 1992 Republican Convention and her emotive speech on HIV/AIDS hushed millions around the globe.

While Fisher’s I’ll Not Go Quietly autobiography is testimony to her ongoing courage, her creative energy in the past few years has also been focused on caregivers and patients with AIDS—taking photographs and narratives, weaving them into quilts and sketching them into sculpture.

The end result is a powerful and compassionate exhibition, Abataka, which runs from Sept. 19 through Oct. 15 at Rochester Institute of Technology’s Bevier Gallery. Fisher is scheduled to speak on AIDS and the role of artists from 4 to 5 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 19, at Webb Auditorium in the James E. Booth Building. A reception will follow from 5 to 7 p.m. at Bevier Gallery.

The exhibit, Abataka—an African term for family, tribe and community—was named while Fisher was visiting tribal cultures in Africa. Although she describes some of her artwork as darker than others “because disease and death and grief are dark subjects,” she sends a contrasting message with other pieces in the exhibition where “hope breaks through everywhere in color and love and song.”

“We had come together because of the terror of AIDS,” says Fisher, “but through the miracle of Abataka, we were soon bound in compassion and hope and even laughter: one community created from many cultures.”