Serving as a backdrop for artist and community organizer Jessica Lynn Whitbread’s site-specific installation titled Mapping Informal Networks of Women Living with HIV (2011-present), Anthea Black’s wallpaper creates an atmosphere of queer warmth, privacy, and intimacy. During the Take Care exhibition series, Black’s wallpaper spanned the curved wall of the Blackwood Gallery, encircling Whitbread’s installation (which also included contributions by Jess MacCormack and Johnny Nawrajac). The installation functioned as an interpersonal space for women with HIV to network, self-advocate, and share their experiences.

During the tea parties that compose Whitbread’s ongoing project, woman living with HIV are invited to bring a teacup and a letter that they have written, and to exchange these for a teacup and a letter brought by someone else. As curator Lauren Fournier writes: “Though it [took] place in the institutional space of UTM, the tea party [made] space for confidentiality and communion between women living with HIV. By having the gallery function as a space to host women from surrounding communities, the installation [became] less a static sculpture and more an active trace of both past and present tea parties.” The gender play of Black’s wallpaper, as well as its antique, domestic quality remind us that the home—that which is private—is also deeply intertwined with community, identity politics, and activism. By dressing the white walls of the gallery in a homey wallpaper, Black invites audiences to consider the space as a kind of nest for community-building and queer activism.