UPDATE:

According to Imara Canady, national communications director for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation who contacted Dallas Voice this morning, AHF tried numerous times to get in touch with the original artist who created the mural that was on the side of the building at 4014 Cedar Springs Road to talk about restoring the artwork which had begun to deteriorate. When the agency got no response, AHF officials contacted another artist local to DFW who is designing a new mural celebrating the LGBTQ+ community and honoring the community’s ongoing fight against HIV/AIDS. Painting over the existing mural with the dark gray color was the first step in preparing for the new mural, Canady said.

Canady said AHF will send an official statement, including the name of the local artist chosen to design and paint a new mural as soon as possible. We will update this post when we receive that statement.

ORIGINAL POST:

Social media posts made Tuesday evening show the south side of the building at 4014 Cedar Springs Road, the former home of Resource Center’s Nelson-Tebedo Health Center, painted a dark, dull gray. The blank slate wall came as a shock to many of the area’s residents, visitors and business who were used to seeing a vibrant, multi-color mural honoring the LGBTQ+ community and the fight against HIV/AIDS.

As Lee Daugherty noted in a post to the Friends of Oak Lawn page on Facebook, “Today a new tenant on Cedar Springs at the old Nelson-Tebedo [clinic] took it on themselves to paint over a 2018 mural of the AIDS quilt, a solemn remembrance and a dedication that we take care of each other. I’m unaware which clinic is moving in at this time, but it’s brave to move into a community and immediately erase it.”

The mural, known as Dallas Red Foundation’s HIV/AIDS Commemorative Mural, was conceived as a joint project between Dallas Red Foundation’s REDucate Committee and the community art group Arttitude, designed by Arttitude muralist Lee Madrid “after talking with community leaders and employees of Resource Center’s Nelson-Tebedo Clinic upon which the mural is painted. The mural offers a message of hope and community while acknowledging the HIV/AIDS crisis and the continued need for HIV/AIDS to be at the forefront of public attention,” John Anderson, secretary of Dallas Red Foundation and a member the REDucation Committee, explained in a January 2019 Voices column in Dallas Voice.

Photos courtesy of John Anderson

Anderson told Dallas Voice Tuesday night that the new tenant in the building is the AIDS Healthcare Foundation clinic. He wrote in a post on his own Facebook page, “A LOT of work was put into this by a few different local organizations. Community art is not something you can just erase. Someone has some explaining to do.”

In his 2019 column for Dallas Voice, Anderson explained that the mural was designed, with input from community leaders and employees of Resource Center’s Nelson-Tebedo Clinic, to “offer a message of hope and community while acknowledging the HIV/AIDS crisis and the continued need for HIV/AIDS to be at the forefront of public attention.”

He said that the mural featured “four diverse hands coming together to create red heart shapes” intended as the perfect backdrop for selfies. In addition, “References to the decline in deaths over time and the ever-increasing number of individuals living with HIV [were] incorporated between multicolored, geometric shapes” painted in colors “reminiscent of the quintessential rainbow motif common in LGBTQ art and culture. A large portion of the mural depict[ed] silhouettes looking over sections of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, created as a memorial celebrating the lives of people who have died of AIDS-related causes.”

Dallas Voice Senior Staff Writer David Taffet has written several articles chronicling the conception of the mural and its progress along the way. Read some of them here, here and here.

Dallas Voice will be contacting AHF to ask why the mural was painted over and who made the decision to do so. When we hear from them, we will update this post.

— Tammye Nash

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