“When you think of HIV and AIDS, what picture of a person comes into your mind? Does that person ever look like you? It doesn’t, right? Like you don’t even think about your friends. You always think about somebody that’s in a different, unfortunate situation than you are. But HIV sounds like you, it sounds like me, sounds like her.”
After learning that Black women in Orange County were 12 times more likely to contract HIV than their white counterparts, Chianna Collins was tasked with raising awareness by doing more than just billboards or bus wraps. Instead of traditional boring marketing, as a Black woman herself, she wanted to incorporate music and pop-up testing to make her campaign more culturally driven.
Inspired by the Trap Music Museum in Atlanta, Collins devised an immersive art installation to spotlight the stories of Black women and address the issue of HIV prevention. However, when she took this idea to CityArts in downtown Orlando, she was turned down…