For thirty years I have made prints, paper and worked as a physician and psychiatrist. My art, primarily prints, explores issues such as human rights abuses, social responses to disease (HIV and emerging infectious diseases), death, sexuality and the body. My art-medicine actions have given structural form to the liminal space between art and medicine.

HIV Prisoner Woman's Story is from a collaborative project with Sue Coe, portraits of HIV + women incarcerated in a Texas women's prison where I worked as a HIV specialist psychiatrist. Many of my HIV + patients have common life stories that led to drug dependence and exposure to HIV. This woodcut reports the story of Vicki and reads from left to right. On the left side a child is led into a bedroom scene of molestation and abuse. As the child entered her teen years, the mother physically abused her daughter "She would crack my head with a plate if I did not listen". As a young woman, she married her "sugar daddy" who shot the family dog through a screen door, then turned the gun towrds Vicki. In the fight for the gun, the husband was shot "I emptied the gun into him, it was always put in my face". When Vicki entered the prison, she left her child who was placed in foster care. Also when she entered prison, she was tested and found out she had HIV. When I interviewed her with Sue, she was working as a peer HIV educator and wanted us to tell her story in order to help other women who suffered her kind of abuses.

Biography

Eric Avery was born in 1948 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He earned his B.A. from the University of Arizona in 1970, and his M.D. from the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, in 1974. Following the completion of medical school, Avery began his psychiatric residency at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City which he completed in 1979. Currently, Avery is a consulting psychiatrist at The University of Texas Medical Branch where he works in the HIV and Hepatitis C Clinics.

Avery has held numerous solo exhibitions in the United States and his prints are housed in collections including those of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; The Library of Congress, Washington, DC; ARS Medical Collection, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; The Boston Museum of Art, Boston, MA; the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; and The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT. In England, his work is included in The Welcome Trust Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine.