QUEER, ILL + OKAY (2016)

QUEER, ILL + OKAY is an annual multidisciplinary performance series exploring, challenging and reinventing narratives about the lives of queer individuals and their relationships to HIV and other forms of mental and chronic illness. After being diagnosed as HIV+ in 2013, Joe Varisco invited an expansive artistic community to create new work around the relationship between queerness, the body, and chronic illness.

“QUEER, ILL + OKAY has grown exponentially for our fourth annual production. This show is a powerfully personal exploration of reinventing narratives that is critically inclusive of a vast spectrum of experience. I could not be prouder to helm the production of an unrelentingly forward moving conversation with these artistic communities. This year we’ve doubled all efforts, bringing two weekends of new and original content with fourteen artists, in collaboration with Oracle Productions and Art AIDS America Chicago, a national touring exhibition. QUEER, ILL + OKAY elevates conversation as a creative movement engaging arts and social justice as tools for effective change on a national scale,” says Joe Varisco.