This ongoing series of Thursday-night events looks deeply at what makes museums tick and what they offer the culture at large.

The recent censorship of David Wojnarowicz’s film A Fire in My Belly at the National Portrait Gallery has renewed interest in the impact of AIDS on the art world. See Wojnarowicz’s four-minute film and hear personal perspectives on the devastation AIDS caused in New York City in the 1980s and ’90s, and the activism and community building that resulted from it. Carnegie Museum of Art director Lynn Zelevansky will talk with Tom Sokolowski (founder of Visual AIDS, the Red Ribbon Project, Day without Art, the Quilt Project, and former director of The Andy Warhol Museum) and Patrick Moore (founding director of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, member of ACT UP New York, author of Beyond Shame and Tweaked, and current Business Development Officer at Pittsburgh’s Persad Center) about Wojnarowicz’s work and the ways in which AIDS changed our world forever.