Artist Talk: Joey Terrill

Co-presented with the UCLA César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies

Artist and retired Director of Global Advocacy & Partnerships for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Joey Terrill, speaks about his life’s work as an artist and activist focusing on issues facing queer Chicano communities in Los Angeles and beyond.

Joey Terrill’s intimate, stylized figurative works, many of which were made amid the devastations of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, depict gay Chicano men absorbed in the drama of desire. The work makes strong use of settings, both real and imagined, private and public, generic and identifiable, to contextualize the artist’s life and social scene. This strategy recurs throughout his work, often highlighting landmarks and sites in Los Angeles and New York. 

In self-portraits from the 1980s and in paintings of friends, Terrill’s figures speak to the queer community that defined his painting practice. The artist’s subjects lounge, embrace, and cohabitate. They tend to their lives and to each other with care and devotion. In recent works, Terrill has revisited photographs from a period of time he spent in New York as sources for new paintings, thus bringing formative memories into the present. Like all of his work, these pieces memorialize the people, places, and moments that shaped his life.