As It Is

Eric Avery, artist

born 1948

Bill Lagatutta, printer

Peregrine Press, publisher

As It Is, 1987

Portfolio/Series title: Damn It

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: mulberry paper; woodcut; color lithograph

Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 542 x 780 mm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 21 5/16 x 30 11/16 in
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 624 x 862 mm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 24 9/16 x 33 15/16 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 30 x 36 in

Credit line: Gift of the artist

Accession number: 2003.0189

Not on display

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Label texts

Healing, Knowing, Seeing the Body

In his series Damn It, Dr. Eric Avery—a psychiatrist who worked on the front lines of the 1980s AIDS epidemic—documents a homosexual love story from its first encounter, subsequent AIDS diagnosis and illness, and, finally, the autopsy portrayed in As It Is. Each of the prints in the series references other works of art, from Albrecht Dürer’s The Bath House (1496) to Max Beckman’s The Morgue (1922), which provided the source imagery for this work. By drawing from this art historical narrative, Avery inserts the AIDS epidemic into a long global history of disease in order to destigmatize the illness and draw attention to the shared physical and spiritual struggles of love and death that unite us all.

Healing, Knowing, Seeing the Body