AIDS, Art & the Origins of the Culture War presents three-and-a-half decades of articles and essays stemming from these contentious assaults on the rights of individuals, institutions, and, by extension, all Americans. A staff columnist for the Village Voice during the 1980s and 90s, Atkins produced both eye-witness reporting and thoughtful analysis from 1987 and the debut of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Washington, DC to the most recently published piece collected for the book, his 2019 review of Benjamin Moser’s biography of Susan Sontag. The book also features When the Culture War Became the Culture, his lengthy, recently written cultural history of the past half century in the US against which the book’s narrative plays out.

Robert Atkins is a UC Berkeley-trained art historian, journalist, curator, and educator. A former columnist for The Village Voice, he has written for more than 100 publications worldwide. Among his many books is Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression, published by the New Press. He has curated exhibitions in far-flung venues from Sao Paolo, Brazil to New York and co-curated From Media to Metaphor: Art About AIDS, the first international traveling exhibition of AIDS art. A pioneer of online art production and commentary, he is a fellow of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University and producer of Artery: the AIDS Arts Forum. He is also a founder of Visual AIDS, the producers of Day With(out) Art and the Red Ribbon.