We’ll Never Have That Recipe Again

Personal statements are a tradition in the MS Design program. For the first two weeks of winter quarter, second year masters students make a piece that carries a message they want to put into the world.

“We’ll Never Have That Recipe Again” is a memorial mural for the lives lost to the AIDS epidemic in the United States. It is also a devotion to the queer people and ACT UP organizers whose love, joy, rage, and tactical brilliance made my own life possible. Its title is inspired by Donna Summer’s MacArthur Park, a song about lost love embodied as a beautiful cake left out in the rain, the recipe gone forever.

The work consists of nearly 3,000 risograph-printed tiles, each individually cut and nailed onto a wood canvas. The tiles are not adhered; they move with the elements, animating the surface. Each tile represents one hundred gay men whose lives have been lost in the United States since the start of the epidemic. The 8 x 8 foot scale is intentional, and still incomplete. Even at 3,000 tiles, the mural cannot hold everyone we have lost.

The piece sits in a longer tradition of AIDS memorial work, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in LA), while deploying a register of action and discovery. It is somber, yes, but it is also a record of the love, care, joy, resilience, and bravery I see when I look at this period of our history. My friends and I are here, healthy, and on PrEP, because of what these people fought for. I want the work to live across generations: a place where elders see their losses honored and younger queer people, who have reaped the benefits of ACT UP, are called into the work of continuing it.

The tiles move because the people they honor are not cemented in the past. Their traces are everywhere. We may never have that recipe again, but we are eating from the very table they set for us.