Peter Blum Edition Presents:
General Idea
Fear Management, 1987
June 25 - 29, 2019
Curated by Alexandria Deters
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and World PRIDE, Peter Blum Gallery will be presenting a special week long exhibition of the Peter Blum Edition portfolio Fear Management, 1987 by General Idea, in our Backroom Gallery. The inaugural PBE Presents exhibition will be on view June 25-29.
…the portfolio was issued at a crucial point, when General Idea turned nearly wholly to AIDS as a subject. One cannot help but read the prints as shifting between two emotional tones, one portentous and the other still playful...The prints convey the sense that the artists are taking a vacation from the reality at hand, retrospectively surveying two decades of imagery but hovering on the verge of the unavoidable bad news.
-Faye Hirsch, Singular Multiples: The Peter Blum Edition Archive 1980-1994, 2006
General Idea was a queer art collective founded in 1967 in Toronto, Canada by Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal, and AA Bronson. These three men worked together professionally and lived together domestically as a group until 1994 when Partz and Zontal passed away due to complications from AIDS. General Idea is known internationally for being on the forefront of conceptual and queer art in 1970s-80s and for their explicitly HIV/AIDS activism art. The collective founded and ran the celebrated selfpublished FILE Megazine from 1972–1989. AA Bronson was previously the director of Printed Matter, Inc in New York (2006-2011) and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany where he continues to exhibit and make work as an independent artist. The General Idea Archive resides at the Library of the National Gallery of Canada.