Former The Dallas Way board member Nino Testa will speak at the Irving Archives and Museum, which is currently running an LGBTQ+ history exhibit put together by Badge of Pride.
Among the featured items in the exhibit is a Dallas quilt panel that is the most popular panel among the 40,000 that have been made. Here’s what Badge of Pride wrote about Duane Puryear’s panel that hung at Resource Center for a couple of years:
When Duane Puryear, a gay Dallas activist and AIDS educator, decided to make his own panel for the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt in 1988, he wanted to make a statement about the value of queer life and the urgency of the political moment. However, his one-of-a-kind panel was lost before he could send it to become part of the AIDS Quilt. After his death in 1991, his parents, Martha and Doug Puryear, re-made the panel as part of their grieving process. This panel is now one of the most routinely displayed panels on the AIDS Quilt. The hidden history of Duane’s panel shows us how to understand the Quilt at the nexus of local AIDS activism and global AIDS memorial.
Through a series of oral history interviews and archival research, Nino Testa will re-trace the story of Duane’s unforgettable panel and the legacy of his art and activism.
Testa is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Women’s Institute at Chatham University in Pittsburgh. He will begin as a Teaching Assistant Professor in Women and Gender Studies at West Virginia University in the fall. His research focuses on histories of queer arts as activism. He is a former board member of The Dallas Way: An LGBTQ History Project and served on the Badge of Pride Exhibition Advisory Committee.
He will speak on Sunday, July 20 at 1 p.m. at the Irving Archives and Museum, 801 W. Irving Blvd., Irving.
— David Taffet