TAMMYE NASH | Managing Editor
Nash@DallasVoice.com
Officials with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation were in Dallas this week to apologize to local advocates and community leaders for a mistake in communications that resulted in Dallas Red Foundation’s HIV/AIDS Commemorative Mural, painted in 2018 on the south exterior wall of the building at 4014 Cedar Springs Road being painted over with a flat, dark gray paint.
The building, previously occupied by Resource Center’s Nelson Tebedo Clinic, is the new home of an AHF clinic set to open there in the heart of the Dallas Gayborhood.
“We are here to apologize for this wound to the community” caused by the mural being painted over,” said Rig Rush, AHF’s national director of branding.”
“We made a mistake,” said Whitney Engeran, vice president of AHF’s Public Health Division, acknowledging that the agency should have made sure to have all the facts before erasing the mural.
“I apologize — an apology without any excuses,” Engeran added. “I want to find ways to acknowledge that mistake and to make sure this community knows how much it means to us, to me personally, to find a way to make this right.”
The men’s remarks came during a meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 16, between AHF officials that also include AHF Texas Regional Director Anthony Snipes, Associate Director of AHF’s Public Health Division in Texas Ashley Barnes and AHF’s National Director of Community Engagement and Communications W. Imara Canady, and Dallas LGBTQ+ community leaders including Jerome Lárez with Arttitude, John Anderson who was chair of the Dallas Red Foundation committee that arranged the original mural, Cedar Springs Merchants Association board members Lee Daugherty and Chad Mantooth and Rafael McDonnell with Resource Center.
Anger erupted in the Oak Lawn Gayborhood on Sept. 3 when social media posts alerted the community to the fact that the mural, painted there in 2018 as a project of Dallas Red and Arttitude when the building was still occupied by Resource Center’s Nelson Tebedo Clinic.
“Every piece of that mural meant something,” said Anderson, who attended this week’s meeting remotely. “From pointing out that ‘undetectable equals untransmittable’ to spaces created from selfies to depictions of the NAMES Project Quilt to a timeline of the epidemic to messaging — every piece of it came from the community.”
Local leaders at the meeting stressed several times that the Red Foundation mural was much more than just an image painted on a wall. It was a work of community art imagined and designed and implemented by community members working together to honor the LGBTQ+ community and its ongoing battle against HIV/AIDS. In fact, they noted, the last stages of the actual painting of the mural was done by community members who volunteered their time to complete the design.
The mural was also community-funded the local representatives pointed out. Anderson said Dallas Red Foundation contributed $2,500 toward the design and creation of the mural and paid another $600 for a plaque dedicating the art installment.
Engeron said AHF is committed to returning that money to the Dallas LGBTQ+ community as a donation to local nonprofit organizations. That money, he said, will be separate from and in addition to whatever AHF spends to have a new mural designed and painted, and that AHF will cover all the costs associated with installing a new mural.
Rush and Engeron both assured community leaders that the mural would not include any AHF corporate branding. “That’s not how we do it,” Rush said.
By the end of the meeting AHF representatives had agreed to direct those reimbursement funds to Arttitude, which will then oversee distribution of the funds to community organizations addressing HIV/AIDS.
Rush explained that as director of branding for AHF, he has overseen murals and other public art at numerous AHF facilities around the country. That art, he said, is considered a vital part of AHF’s mission, and a new mural was always in the plans for the agency’s Cedar Springs clinic.
Rush said that he and other AHF representatives had tried to locate the “original artist” of the mural to discuss the possibility of restoring the mural, and that when they had discovered that Dallas Red Foundation was no longer in existence, they had moved forward with plans for a new mural.
“We didn’t look hard enough,” Rush said. “We should have kept looking.”
Rush said he has already been working with an artist local to Dallas to design a new mural for that wall. However, after hearing the concerns and more on the background of the original mural, Rush said, those plans will be set aside as AHF representatives work with representatives from Arttitude and other community leaders to get input and ideas from the community so that the new mural will, as was the original, be a symbol of the LGBTQ+ community’s strength, vibrance and joy as well as a memorial to those lost to HIV/AIDS.
Lárez and other Arttitude representatives are setting a process for gathering community input, and they will then work with Rush and others from AHF to get the mural designed and completed by World AIDS Day on Dec. 1 this year. Rush acknowledged that, due to various factors, that Dec. 1 date may be a bit ambitious, “but even if we have to adjust the timeline, this will be completed.”
Snipes ended the meeting with a promise to local leaders that AHF “wants to be a good neighbor, a good community member,” and that he and others with the agency will do whatever is necessary to “show our hearts are in the right place.”