MAKE ART/STOP AIDS is an international network of scholars, artists, and activists committed to ending the global AIDS epidemic. With more than 40 million people infected with HIV around the world, and with only approximately 1 million receiving state-of-the-art care, the need for such a network is urgent. MAKE ART/STOP AIDS is founded on the principle that artists are an essential part of anti-AIDS efforts. Artists are master communicators. The arts themselves carry enormous potential as tools of education and information-sharing. Thus, MAKE ART/STOP AIDS seeks to establish artists as key partners in AIDS interventions around the world.

The initiative was founded in 2003 with a $50,000 Global Impact Research grant from UCLA International Institute. This was the first round of such grants from the Institute, underlining the promise of this interdisciplinary venture based in the arts. Subsequent major support has been received from University of California Humanities Research Institute, UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, UCLA AIDS Institute, United States Education Foundation in India (USEFI), and UNAIDS, the United Nations umbrella organization for HIV/AIDS. MAKE ART/STOP AIDS is the major project of a new administrative center at UCLA: The Art and Global Health Center.

Project director David Gere, associate professor at UCLA, established the MAKE ART/STOP AIDS network in India in 2004, with funding provided by a Fulbright research grant. Gere led a four-day workshop in Kolkata with 60 Indian and 15 international artists and activists in July 2004 under the MAKE ART/STOP AIDS banner. A subsequent day-long event in New Delhi brought the concepts developed in the workshop to the attention of leaders from the Indian government, media, and non-governmental organizations. In 2004 and 2005, MAKE ART/STOP AIDS events were held on the UCLA campus. These included an international conference, an annual World AIDS Day rally attracting hundreds of students, numerous workshops, and an array of student activist projects. In addition, Gere and his counterpart Robert Sember, associate research scientist at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, have developed and taught a yearly MAKE ART/STOP AIDS course at UCLA to strengthen the foundation for student activism on global HIV/AIDS issues.

Currently, Profs. Gere and Sember are co-curating an international MAKE ART/STOP AIDS touring exhibition and allied programs. Bringing together key works of visual and performing art from the U.S., Brazil, South Africa, and India and will open at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History (2008) before touring to major museums in Mexico (Mexico City), Brazil (San Paulo), South Africa (Durban and Cape Town), and India (New Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Mumbai). The goal of the 4,000-square-foot exhibition is to make palpable the ways in which the arts can save lives in the face of this global epidemic.