Beloved

Beloved   ©1994  David Keating - wood, 48 cabinet card photographs, engraved marble, glazing.

The sentiment inscribed on the central marble of this piece is borrowed from Tennessee Williams’ play, Sweet Bird of Youth. The main character is bemoaning the loss of her younger self:

I feel as if someone I loved had died lately, [only] I don’t want to remember who it could be.

For me the words recall a chill that passed over me while watching a benefit at San Francisco’s Castro Theater in the early 1990s. AIDS had ravaged the community, and for a brief instant, it seemed to me that every seat was occupied by the ghost of someone who had passed away — someone I would never meet, but whom I might otherwise have befriended or even loved. At the time I was coming to grips with my own HIV diagnosis and the loss of a partner and close friend to AIDS.

I have coupled this epitaph in all its tenses with the portraits and names of four dozen men – arranged as doppelgangers or surrogate “brethren” from a previous century – including my maternal great-grandfather. I wanted to speak to a loss that felt immediate and personal, but also timeless and immeasurable.

In just a few years, the Covid pandemic has incurred more fatalities nationally than four decades of the AIDS crisis. Our communities have had to absorb this toll quickly with few opportunities for collective mourning. Perhaps this piece will help others to process a loss that is hard to acknowledge.