Mary Bowman Arts in Activism Award 2025

Recipients of the Mary Bowman Arts in Activism Award will be asked to share the art that was funded by this award within one year upon recipient's receipt of funds. The National AIDS Memorial will have no ownership of the art - we simply wish to share with our funding partner the inspiring work that it supported.

The Mary Bowman Arts in Activism Award

To honor Mary’s legacy and support other accomplished young and emerging art activists (“artivists”) like her, the National AIDS Memorial created the Mary Bowman Arts in Activism Award. Student and non-student art activists are welcome to apply for this award. These $5,000 awards are intended to support young and emerging artivists each year who exemplify Mary’s passion for the arts as the vehicle for their own HIV/AIDS and/or health and social justice community activism and expression.

Recipients of the Mary Bowman Arts in Activism Award use their art and activism to raise greater awareness about bigotry, stigma, and social justice around the issue of HIV/AIDS and/or the persisting health and social inequities that fuel the continued spread of the disease.

Click here to meet our 2024 Mary Bowman Arts in Activism Awardees.

About Mary Bowman

In May of 2019, the HIV/AIDS world lost its most promising poet, advocate, author, singer and young person living with AIDS, Mary Bowman. Mary was 30 years old. Born with HIV, she lived out her experiences of growing up and living with HIV (and losing a mother to AIDS) through her art. As a young, out woman of color, she was a dynamic, vital voice for the next generation of individuals living with HIV—proud, willing to speak of her own challenges with not just her own health needs (mental health, social support) —but also a fierce advocate for other young people with HIV for whom a voice was lacking. For Mary, the arts gave her the platform and voice to channel her creative energy, her passion, her truth.

In general, artivism harnesses the critical imagination to design events and strategies that provoke new questions and new meaning in pursuit of more respectful ways of being. As an example, with respect to HIV/AIDS, such artistic statements are frequently borne from a variety of perspectives in terms of gender, sexuality, age, class, ethnicity, and nationality, and wield artistic expression as a tool for combating stigma. Stigma, and all it entails—shame, isolation, embarrassment, exclusion, shunning—remains among the most formidable barriers to fighting the epidemic.

For more information about the Mary Bowman Arts in Activism Award, click here.

In addition to the judges' understanding of - and response to - each applicant's examples of their art activism submissions, judges will be reviewing each application to confirm that the applicant has thoroughly addressed the personal statement and essay prompts, and meets the requirements, detailed in our Application Requirements.

For the Mary Bowman Arts in Activism Award Application Requirements, Click Here.