SAN YGNACIO, Texas — For those who are not familiar with Eric Avery or his art, some background information is worthwhile. After receiving his BFA in printmaking from the University of Arizona in 1970, he entered the newly established Institute for the Medical Humanities of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, receiving his degree in 1974, followed by a residency at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
In the late 1970s and early ’80s, he applied his medical training to work with refugees, treating Vietnamese refugees at sea and serving as the medical director at the Las Dhure Refugee Camp in Somalia, which was in the midst of a severe drought and sectarian war. Through all of these health crises he continued to make art, and after settling in San Ygnacio, Texas, a stone’s throw from the Rio Grande, to work as the southern region refugee coordinator for Amnesty International USA, he began exhibiting his artworks.
While I was sitting in Avery’s home studio asking about his earlier life, he showed me a wood block print he had made at Las Dhure — a certificate he created from a piece of scrap wood he found at the camp. He felt that camp workers should be acknowledged for their service. Amid this dire situation, in which infant mortality was confronted daily, he redefined the border between what the art world quaintly calls art and life. If anything, experiences like this call for borders to be challenged and transgressed. For the artist, the idea of the gallery or museum as a white cube, a neutral space set off from everyday life, from grief and suffering, aid and healing, is indicative of our society’s antiseptic need to compartmentalize experience.
Refusing to separate his medical and art practices, Avery has developed what he calls “art medicine projects.” Ilene Dube, writing in Hyperallergic, stated that he “has dedicated his entire printmaking oeuvre to promoting health.” In his art he responds to what he has witnessed as a doctor, and to crises such as the opioid epidemic, the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which killed 19 students and two teachers, and the reemergence of the Mexican fruit fly, which has prompted the USDA to quarantine sections of the citrus industry. Employing various print techniques including woodblock, intaglio, silkscreen, and laser printing, his art has taken the form of broadsides, posters, pamphlets, vinyl banners, and large mixed-media prints.
Form and content are inseparable in Avery’s work. A series of molded paper woodcuts, all titled “HIV Condom Piñata” (1993/2015) are black spheres covered with white dots that evoke the AIDS virus, while “Covid Bowl” (2021) is a 44-inch-tall Mexican pine serving bowl, its interior carved with skulls and bones.
His dark humor is evident in a series of postcards on which he printed “Too Depressed to Masturbate” over well-known art reproductions. In other pieces, Avery draws on and updates historical artworks, such as Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut “Adam and Eve” (1504), on which Avery lists the 20 major diseases that have emerged since the end of the Ice Age. He based his 11-color lithograph and linocut “Uvalde Massacre 5/24/22 11:30 am” (2023) on “The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street Boston on March 5th 1770, by a party of the 29th Regt.” (1770), a painted engraving printed by Paul Revere (who copied a drawing by Henry Pelham). Three people were killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre (as it’s commonly known), including Crispus Attucks, a whaler and longshoreman of African and Indigenous American descent.
By establishing a dialogue with Revere’s print — widely considered to be one of the most effective examples of war propaganda in US history — Avery invites us to reflect upon our national origins, and the different roles that guns and the “right to bear arms” have played in our history. In Avery’s print, the firing soldiers are lined up on the left, where the American casualties lie in Revere’s print, opposite the British soldiers. Above them are signs for Daniel Defense and Colt, both firearms manufacturers. In foreground on the right side, Avery has depicted body parts lying in a sea of blood. One figure holds up his arms up while passing through a metal detector. Two people stand amid the victims; one figure at the bottom edge looks out at us with empty black sockets instead of eyes.
Revere’s depiction of British soldiers firing into a crowd lent credence to the American perception of the shooting as a massacre. In Avery’s version, puffs of smoke obscure the shooters, softening the violence. The real focal point is in the bottom left corner directly opposite the victims, where a motley assortment of men, mostly dressed in white shirts, gathers, one of them teaching a child in green shorts how to shoot a pistol. In the foreground, a man wearing a short-sleeved blue shirt and sunglasses carries an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. Behind this grouping of men is a (presumably male) figure with his hands on his head, a sign of surrender and a reference to Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” (1893).
Paul Revere’s propaganda print was meant to rouse people action. In contrast, Avery asks us to consider how massacres have become ever more deadly and commonplace since the time of Revere. In a career that stretches across a catastrophic half century of health crises and wars, Avery applies his activist and empathetic social conscience to all he does.
