The Miami Herald

July 8, 2000

By Gail Meadows

Xavier Cortada, the Miami mural painter with the golden touch, is off to Durban, South Africa, for the XIII International AIDS Conference, where he’s to lead participants in painting Breaking the Silence, the conference’s official mural.
He did the same thing two years ago at the most recent international AIDS conference, in Geneva.

Cortada will lead participants in writing messages about AIDS on pieces of paper, as he did in Switzerland. He then glues the messages on the background of the canvas he’s painting. The finished product, 20 feet long, will be unveiled at the closing session of the conference and presented to the people of South Africa.

“These murals,” says Cortada “are powerful not only because they generate much needed awareness, but because they document what our global community had to say [in virtually every language] about AIDS” during a critical time for Africa, where AIDS is epidemic.