Art in an Apocalypse: AIDS, Activism, and Abolition in Work of Essex Hemphill and Alternative Video Production

Author

• Sydney E. Guntharp, University of MississippiFollow

Date of Award

Spring 5-9-2026

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Department

English

First Advisor

Jaime Harker

Second Advisor

Patrick E. Alexander

Third Advisor

Cornelius Bynum

Relational Format

Dissertation/Thesis

Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of Black, POC, feminist, and queer art in the late twentieth century, examining both the AIDS crisis and the increasing privatization of the prison industrial complex as key factors in the development of Essex Hemphill’s poetic, expressive works and the filmmaking activism of various videotape collectives. Through employing the lens of critical prison studies, this work seeks to understand how Black and POC art emerged as a site of political resistance to a carceral state as well as the broader social punishment doctrine that influenced the public health response to AIDS in the United States. The research situates itself in key debates that have influenced the consciousness of African American writers and artists for generations: the distinction between art for entertainment and art for total social and political transformation. This work argues that Hemphill and AIDS video activists were utilizing abolition feminist aesthetics and praxes to simultaneously subvert traditional cultural mediums steeped in the history of white supremacist institutions while imagining liberated Black, queer, and feminist futurities beyond the systems of white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.

Recommended Citation

Guntharp, Sydney E., "Art in an Apocalypse: AIDS, Activism, and Abolition in Work of Essex Hemphill and Alternative Video Production" (2026). Honors Theses. 3462.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/3462

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.