Avram Finkelstein is an artist, activist and writer living in Brooklyn, and a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. He is featured in the American Artist oral history project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. His book, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images, is available through University of California Press, and was nominated for an International Center of Photography' 2018 Infinity Award in Critical Writing and Research, and a 30th Annual Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Nonfiction. He has work in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum, the New Museum, the Smithsonian, the Brooklyn Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the New York Public Library, and his work has shown at the Whitney Museum, The Shed, the Metropolitan Museum, the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirschhorn Museum, the Cooper Hewitt Museum, Grey Art Gallery, the Migros Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Leslie Lohman Museum. He has had numerous public commissions, and residencies at Pioneer Works and The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.
Finkelstein has been interviewed about art in the public sphere by international publications including The New York Times, Frieze, Artforum, Bomb, NPR, and Interview, and for multiple film and oral history projects, including After Silence, Let The Record Show, Silence Opens Doors and the ACT UP Oral History Project. He has been invited to speak about art, political activism, LGBT politics and cultural production, the American Left, and art and intellectual property by Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, NYU, Exit Art, Fordham, RISD, MassArt, the New School, Parsons, and the Arts and Labor working group of Occupy Wall Street.
His practice also includes an experiment in political art-making, the "Flash Collective," a workshop centered on the creation of a one day collective to produce a single art intervention in a public space. Finkelstein has been invited to conduct dozens of Flash Collectives by instiutions including Yale, New York University, Concordia University, The New York Public Library, The New School, Visual AIDS, GMHC, Broadway Cares, and The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, and has spoken about them at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yale, The New School, SUNY and Visual AIDS. The work of multiple flash collectives has been show at the Migros Museum in Zurich, Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort, NL, the New York AIDS Memorial, and La MaMA Galleria, they have been covered by Slate and the Vice Creators Project, and are the subject of a documentary, After Silence, by Vincent Gagliostro.