Eric Avery, Bluebonnet: Texas State Flower, 1988

Eric Avery

This beautiful limited edition lithograph by Eric Avery was published in 1988 as part of the Art Against Aids portfolio, numbered 38/50. Superb provenance as it is was acquired from the original Art Against AIDS Portfolio published in Houston, Texas. This will be the first time the work will be removed from the portfolio. the 1980s (the Reagan era) was the height of the AIDS epidemic in the US, and this portfolio represents one of many attempts by the creative community, which was disproportionately affected by this crisis, to combat this scourge.
Eric Avery is an artist/printmaker who became a physician during the Vietnam War in the 1970's. In 1974, he received his medical degree from The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas and then in 1978 completed his psychiatry training at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City. For forty years he has worked at the intersection of visual art and medicine, leaving the practice of medicine several times to concentrate on his art career. His social content prints explore issues such as Human Rights Abuses, and Social Responses to Disease (specifically HIV and Emerging Infectious Diseases), Death, Sexuality and the Body. His body of work is more thoroughly represented at www.docart.com.
​For twenty years, he worked as the HIV psychiatrist at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, Texas. He has a long association with the Institute for Medical Humanities (IMH) at UTMB and from 1992-2012 while at UTMB, he made prints, paper and art actions that reflected his clinical work with HIV/AIDS. In the 1990's, in clinical art actions that high lighted developments in HIV care, he moved HIV medical practice into the protected aesthetic art space of museums and galleries, trying to prove that art can save lives. He retired from his clinical practice in 2012 to focus on his art medicine and collaborative projects. He remains Associate Professor Emeritus at the IMH after moving from Texas to New Hope, Pennsylvania in 2012.
He has had numerous solo exhibitions in the United States and his prints are in many collections including: Smith College Art Museum, Baltimore Art Museum, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Firestone Library at Princeton University, The Library of Congress, ARS MEDICA collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Blanton Museum of Art, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, The Boston Museum of Art, The National Library of Medicine, The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University School of Medicine, and the Watson Library At the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In England, his work is included in The British Museum and The Wellcome Trust Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine.