Nayland Blake

Nayland Blake (U.S., b. 1960) Negative Bunny, 1994

Single-channel video, (color, sound); 30 mins. Henry Art Gallery, gift from the Collection of Steven Johnson and Walter Sudol, 2007.69

Nayland Blake is an American conceptual artist whose work addresses questions of sexual, racial, and queer identity. In Negative Bunny, a squeaky-voiced toy rabbit pleads unrelentingly with an unseen interlocutor, deploying a range of increasingly emotionally manipulative strategies to convince them to have sex with him. Blake’s bunny repeatedly proclaims that he’s negative—a reference to his HIV status. Made at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Negative Bunny attests to the profound risks of intimacy and high stakes of trust in the face of the mortal threat of HIV/AIDS.

The rabbit is a long recurring motif in Blake’s work and, often, a stand-in for gay men. Associated with promiscuity and fertility, it is also a mythological trickster, a reference to Joseph Beuys’s hare, and the iconic symbol of Playboy magazine. In Negative Bunny, the rabbit lends levity and accessibility to a then-taboo topic.