Gaytime in Sydney: Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Arts Festival

William Yang (b. 1943) is a Sydney-based photographer and pioneer of LGBTQI+ Australian photographic practice. Born in Mareeba, just outside of the northern Queensland city of Cairns, Yang became recognised for his emotive documentation of Sydney's queer scene after moving to the capital of New South Wales in the late 1960s. Yang's photographs record in intimate and moving detail the emergence and impact of HIV/AIDS on his friends and broader community within the city in the 1980s. Yang's work also engages with his identity in relation to his Chinese-Australian ancestry, and familial relationships and histories. The artist is known particularly for his technique of inscribing photographic prints with commentary and reflections that broaden the frame of the image, integrating photography and memoir to create a hybrid life-image writing. Yang's work has featured in significant group exhibitions both interstate and internationally, including *World Without End*, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2000); *Don't Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS*, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (1994); *Life Lines*, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2009); *On the Edge: Australian Photographers of the 1970s*, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego (1998); *Sydney Photographed*, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (1994); and *From Bondi to Uluru*, Higashikawa Arts Centre, Hokkaido (1993). The artist's practice has been surveyed in a number of prominent retrospectives and solo presentations including *Diaries*, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (1998); *William Yang: Australian Chinese*, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra (2001); and *William Yang: Seeing and Being Seen*, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (2021). His works are held in major state galleries, as well as the National Gallery of Australia and National Portrait Gallery.

Lisa Zanderigo is a practicing Visual Artist of 35 years, with a Master of Visual Arts in Photomedia from Sydney University. Lisa has lectured in Photography and Visual Arts for over 28 years, including at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Technology Sydney and the Australian Film Television and Radio School. Zanderigo's early work was in Documentary Photography, and was inspired by the Documentary greats like Henri Cartier Bresson, Josef Koudelka and Sebastiao Salgado. She was one of the photographers who worked on the Mardi Gras book *The Night of Your Life* and documented the LGBTQI+ community over the years. After this her work shifted away from the documentary format to mixed media and installation. This gave her more scope to investigate ideas around identity, gender & sexuality and was inspired by artists such as Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Bill Viola, Fiona Hall, and Bill Henson. Zanderigo has an exhibition history of 35 years that includes exhibitions at Stills Gallery and Roslyn Oxley 9, reviews in *Photofile*, *Art Monthly*, *Artlink* and *Art+Text*, work in collections including the Art Gallery of NSW, Waverly Public Library and private collections and work published in books including *The Night of Your Life* and *Bicentennial Documentary Project*. Around the turn of the century, in her mid-career, Zanderigo moved away from Photomedia as it advanced into the digital era, to painting, preferring to work with the more tactile & visceral medium of mark-making provided by painting and drawing. She completed the “Painting Like The Masters” oil painting course with Charlie Sheard along with the “Australian Tonal Impressionism” course with Pablo Tapia.

Kaye Shumack (b. 1953–2021) was an artist predominately known her street posters and photographs in the 1990s that were heavily influenced by the 1960s pop culture of Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed and Paul Morrissey. In 1996 Shumack’s ‘The Hard Ground Posters’ were distributed to Sydney’s inner-city Italian Cafe’s in what she described as relating to the idea of ‘latte lesbians’. Shumack’s provocative billboard poster that depicted hip and powerful lesbian women was ripped down by vandals after only two weeks of greeting traffic. Shumack made multiple posters and images for Mardi Gras parades in the 1990s. Shumack exhibited work alongside other prominent queer artists in the group shows ‘Photosynthesis’ and ‘Queerography’ (1994) at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

David McDiarmid (1952–1995) was a leading gay activist and artist who worked in Melbourne, Sydney and New York. As an early gay liberation activist, he wrote for and illustrated the *Sydney Gay Liberation* newsletter and *Gay Liberation Papers*. His first gallery exhibition in Sydney in 1976 focused on gay male identity and sexual liberation themes. McDiarmid’s creative output encompasses art, design, craft, fashion and music. It also sits at the intersection of activism, art, and community art, with gay rights and identity politics being the primary focus in his contemporary art and graphic design. He moved to New York in 1979 where he lived and worked until 1987. Reflecting on his own work in 1992 he said: “I wanted to express myself and I wanted to respond to what was going on and I wanted to reach a gay male audience. I wanted to express very complex emotions and I didn’t know how to do it . . . I was in a bit of a dilemma. I thought, well, how can I get across these complex messages. I didn’t think it was simply a matter of saying gay is good.” McDiarmid designed posters for Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Pride and Leather parties, safe sex and World AIDS Day campaigns and he was artistic director of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. He was diagnosed HIV positive in New York 1986 and from his return to Australia in 1987 his work was concerned with HIV/AIDS experience and politics. His famed *Safe Sex* and *Safe Injecting* posters of 1992 designed for the AIDS Council of NSW were an international sensation after they were shown at the 1993 international AIDS conference in Berlin. The *Rainbow Aphorisms*, a series of digital works created between 1993 until shortly before McDiarmid's death of AIDS-related conditions in 1995, is a key example of his political savvy and wit, combining gay and queer activism with tongue-in-cheek statements, pointed truths, and messages of hope. His work has been widely collected by institutions and in 2017–18 his *Rainbow Aphorisms* featured throughout the London Underground transport network as part of the ongoing *Art on the Underground* program, a presentation initiated by London's Studio Voltaire and the David McDiarmid estate. In 2014, McDiarmid was the subject of the major survey exhibition *David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me* at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. His work continues to be shown internationally.

Brad (Bradley) Levido (1953–1993) was born in Cessnock, NSW, and studied at Newcastle College of Adult Education before moving to Sydney. Working across painting, prints, photography and works on paper, his work was included in numerous exhibitions including the 1992 exhibition *Dead Gay Artists* at the Tin Sheds in Sydney and the 1994 exhibition *+Positive: Artists Addressing AIDS* at Campbelltown City Art Gallery, NSW. His work is held in several public and private collections including the National Gallery of Australia and QAGOMA and was featured in the 1993 TV documentary *Positive Art* (ABC).

Michele Barker is an artist and academic working in the field of media arts with a focus on experimental cinema as a way of exploring the perception and experience of time and embodied engagement with the environment. Her work, in extensive collaboration with Anna Munster, has been included in Vidarte, the Mexican Biennale of Video Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Taipei, The Photographer’s Gallery, London; FILE Festival, Sao Paolo; Museum of Art, Seoul; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Out of a residency at Eyebeam in New York they developed the award-winning work, *Struck*, which has been exhibited in Australia, the US, China and Taiwan. Largescale works include: *évasion*, an 8-channel responsive installation; and the multi-channel interactive work, *HokusPokus*, jury-selected to represent Australasia as part of the International Festival of Digital Art and the Cultural Olympiad in London in 2012. In 2017, they were commissioned to create *pull* for Experimenta Make Sense: Triennial of Media Art, touring Australia, 2017–20, and most recently, *hold* (2019), both of which use water as a force outside humans’ short ‘moment’ in geological time in order to explore time and embodied perception. Currently, as the result of an Ars Bioarctica residency in Kilpisjärvi, they are working on a new project that extends our examination of duration and felt experience into the realm of geotime.