American artist Ann Leda Shapiro was right in the thick of it when art, war, feminism and the Aids epidemic collided in the 20th century.
Born in 1946, she created gender-questioning art in the early 1970s that the Whitney Museum of American Art censored, protested for peace alongside renowned poet Allen Ginsberg, and volunteered at a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) acupuncture clinic that treated Aids patients.
A few years ago, Shapiro revealed that she was a member of the feminist artist collective Guerrilla Girls in the 1980s, and that she came up with the iconic gorilla masks that protected the anonymity of members after she once accidentally misspelt the group’s name as “Gorilla”.
