Credit: Provided

The life-size self-portraits of 14 HIV-positive South Africans provide a message of healing and hope in an upcoming Cornell exhibit.

"Body Maps" are the images created by South African women (and one man) with HIV who traced one another's body outlines on cardboard and added their own unique features and personal symbols of hope. The artwork will be on display Nov. 13 to Dec. 1 in the Willard Straight Hall Art Gallery and Dec. 2-15 in the Carol Tatkon Center.

"This has such visual appeal, and emotional appeal," says professor of anthropology Meredith Small, who organized the exhibit. "They didn't even know they were artists before this project."

The art exercise was part of the Memory Box Project, a University of Cape Town/Doctors Without Borders community outreach program encouraging people with HIV and AIDS in South African townships to take their medication and to creatively express their experience with the disease.

"It's a stigma to have AIDS in South Africa, and especially a stigma for women," Small says. "It's real easy to forget about HIV and AIDS, easy to push it out of the way, unless it's someone you love or your friend who has HIV. The 'Body Maps' exhibit is a real way to bring this home. The writing on one of them says, 'love everyone but trust no one.'"

The artists of the Bambanani Women's Group tell their stories in the 2003 book "Long Life … Positive HIV Stories." All of the artists are "still alive, except for one who was killed in a car accident," Small says.

The original Body Maps are in a museum in Cape Town; the traveling exhibit includes inkjet prints on full-size canvases and on paper. The artists receive a large portion of proceeds from sales. "Over the years all of them have been able to buy homes for themselves and their families," Small says.

Small enlisted the support of the Southern Tier AIDS Program and 13 Cornell departments and programs, including the Johnson Museum, the HIV/AIDS Education Project, the Institute for African Development and Gannett Health Center. The Body Maps appear courtesy of David Krut Projects (http://www.davidkrut.com/project.php?id=44).

Provost Biddy Martin will speak at a reception, Nov. 27 at noon in the Straight Gallery. The NAMES Project's AIDS Memorial Quilt also goes on display Nov. 27 in the WSH Memorial Room and continues through Dec. 1, World AIDS Day.

"The anthropologist in me loves that it comes from a different culture; the mother in me loves that there are babies in all the body maps," Small says. "And I love the message of hope. These are people from undeveloped nations, and if they can be hopeful, there's hope for all of us. It shows the tenacity of the human spirit."