How to Have Color in a Pandemic

Artists who defected from Communist Cuba not only defined the image of creative freedom in washes of color, but some were also responsible for fostering a visual vocabulary for the AIDS crisis at the end of the twentieth century. However, it was Untitled (White Crucifix) (1986), an assemblage by Miami-based artist Humberto Dionisio, that departed from Cuban legibility in polychrome with a turn toward whiteness. By taking up Dionisio’s artwork, this article advances a queer of color(ing) analysis, which combines José Esteban Muñoz’s “brown commons” project with a discussion of whiteness’s muted gradient, or what this article terms “feeling off-white.” Linking Dionisio’s work to a transnational cultural language of religion, avian metaphors, and sickness, this article contends that the artist innovates AIDS visuality by seeing a pandemic from the vantage point of a sexual exile in a world bereft of color.