At the Magnet art show opening: Painter Joseph West, Photographer Nina Bellisio and Wig Master Gerd Mairandres. Photo by Rink.

Magnet, the gay men’s Castro center for health and socializing, is now featuring on its art wall works from the Nexus Men’s Health Collective entitled “Bodies of Knowledge: Art Supporting a Healthy Future.” Magnet held an artists’ reception featuring DJ Pusspuss spinning world music on Nov. 4 to kick off the month-long exhibition open to the public. Featured artists for the show are Nina Bellisio, Nicholas Cattaneo, Joe West, Trevor Southey, and Gerd Mairandres.

Nexus was founded in 2001 to promote and advocate for the health and well being of men in general, and of G/B/T men in San Francisco in particular. It is a grassroots coalition of activists, students, artists, healthcare workers, and citizens-at-large working together to educate individuals on improving the health of the men in our communities. The artwork is being utilized to further queer agendas via projects, events, and campaigns—including the wildly successful OUCH project, providing free hepatitis vaccinations at street fairs and bars/clubs in San Francisco to various communities. OUCH (Organizing Up Communities against Hepatitis) is a project of the Nexus Health Collective, collaborating with the BLOW project of the Center for Sex & Culture, which is also the fiscal sponsor. Started in San Francisco in July, OUCH has amazed the healthcare community by inspiring thousands of men to pay attention to the dangers of hepatitis and getting over 350 men vaccinated for free against Hep A & B. There is no vaccine for Hep C as of yet.

Rick Loftus is a physician in private practice at Davies hospital and co-founder of the Nexus Men’s Health Collective. Not to mention how cute he is. Woof! But I digress. “Another medical student and I founded Nexus in 2001 with the idea of creating an organization dealing with men’s health education and advocacy,” he told Bay Times. He said their original project was doing outreach to gay dance clubs with club drug education, working with volunteers from DanceSafe. Later on, some of the people from Nexus helped create what Magnet is today. He said he was thrilled with Nexus joining OUCH, because a similar project, HepTeam Chicago, took place this past summer, and while they vaccinated possibly three times as many people as OUCH, they spent a hundred times the money. He said OUCH spends approximately $10 on every vaccination, whereas the real world price that people pay is about $200. OUCH offers the shots for free.

Loftus said the Nexus postcards will be modeled after the DanceSafe cards—flashy graphic on the front and basic fact-based health information on the back. Members of the collective who are painters, artists, or photographers donate artwork for the fronts of the cards, and then other members of the collective who are writers, psychologists, doctors, or sexologists write material for the backs of the cards. They are hoping the first edition of the cards will be out in time for the holidays. He said they are hoping for a piece on depression by Bay Times psychotherapy columnist Tom Moon.

Materials will also go up on their web page hosted by the Gay Men’s Community Initiative. “The point is to try to create some grassroots community projects that wed the work of artists with health educators to try to find ways to connect with gay men who have been overwhelmed and inundated with health messages and whose minds sometimes turn off a bit,” said Loftus. “We will use appealing visuals and maybe appeal to peoples’ sense of humor to package the education in a way that connects.”

He said he would also like to create a musical approach with musicians writing songs about STDs and collaborating with health educators. “Kind of like Schoolhouse Rock. If Schoolhouse Rock can teach millions of eight year olds their multiplication tables—a topic that is boring as hell—I figure something as uninteresting as learning about STDs could similarly be made appealing by using music and a sense of humor.” Already I’d have to say we have Tom Orr’s “Clean Your Hole” as a candidate for the project.

For the past five years, Nina Bellisio has been an art history and photography instructor at the Art Institute of California in San Francisco. Bellisio expresses her art via Polaroid photos. She shoots with a children’s I-Zone camera, enlarges, photo-shops, and prints them on drawing paper. She said she liked the idea of tantalizing pictures on the cards to draw attention to Magnet’s services.

Joseph West, painter, said he is involved because he wants to help Nexus raise awareness of health issues through his art. “I am moving more and more towards figurative art,” he said. “I like the human form. It’s very expressive and accessible to people to get connected. It’s mostly non-pretentious, accessible art.” He said his medium is mostly professional grade acrylics on canvas and at times mixed media. He likes working with textures. “It’s hard for me to approach a smooth canvas. I like to be rough and coarse and really get into it, not being too careful with every line I make.” For example, observers will notice patches of burlap in his nude piece.

Trevor Southey, multi-media artist, was born in Rhodesia, Africa (now Zimbabwe) in 1940. In 1965, he immigrated to the United States, retaining an abiding sense of his African and British origins. “Perhaps the arts exist in their extraordinary place within society because they plumb the depths of our mystery and in the same way that spiritual/religious experience reveal us, the arts bring our depths to the surface to blend with our superficialities,” he stated. “For myself in my own work, I was lucky not to come under the influence of the art establishment until it was too late; my artistic direction was set in the remoteness of my distant homeland and the revelation of myself which my work provided was most often a surprise to me.” His media include drawing, printmaking, painting, stained glass, and sculpture.

Nicholas Cattaneo is a graphic designer. “At a very young age, I developed a love and appreciation for art,” he said. “This has been the foundation for which I have built my career and have enjoyed doing so for the past 10 years.” He said when he moved to San Francisco, he began working with Dr. Loftus and the Nexus Health Collective to spread the importance of a healthy gay community.

Gerd Mairandres is the head of the wig and makeup department of SF Opera. “You need to be able to work with all types of materials to achieve the best result,” said Mairandres. “If you want to do this type of work, learn as much as you can about everything.” Nexus organizers said, “We are proud to present recent charcoal and pencil drawings/figure studies from Gerd, which is another of his creative passions.” Mairandres said, “It is a passion to be involved with theatre and being part of a performance that exists only at that moment.”