UCSB Art Studio Professor Gray H Brown, commissioned artist for the 1998 AIDS Chronicle Project, dedicated to his friend, fellow artist John Bommer Murphy II.  The UCSB alumnus (MFA 1984) died from AIDS complication in 1986 at the age of 29.

In his UCSB days, Murphy, AkA John Bommer or VIBGYOR, was a teaching assistant in both art studio and film studies and art director of a film student magazine, Focus. In the years prior to his death, the prolific artist's works were in international exhibitions in Japan. Murphy's works are part of the Virtual Collection (www.artistiwithaid.orgs), an on-line gallery of 150 artists who are HIV positive, are dying from AIDS, or have died.

The chronicles document the epidemic through a year's worth of the front pages of the New York Times.  The pages are collected, painted, and left unbound for a year then they are bound with an artist's original creation as the cover.  Each year's pages are dedicated by the artist to someone who has died from AIDS.

Turning the big pages of the AIDS Chronicles is not only a visual and tactile experience but also educational. Volunteers at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry sponsors of the project and where the chronicles are displayed - took turns painting each day's page, leaving visible only the masthead, the word "obituaries" in the index, and any news reports that mention HIV/AIDS. The pages are a dired blood color, with the consistency of thick skin from repeated application of paint and gesso.

Beautifully hand bound by John Balkwill at the Lumino Press, the finished work is an elegant package for the pages.  Brown, using the four seasons as his theme, begins the year with a brilliant midnight blue winter cover with an outline of "the archer," a male figure in gold leaf on the front cover, and the year ends with autumn, a rusty red that comes closest to the color of the pages with droplets streaming down the front cover and pooling on the back.

-Lillian Kurosaka