Historical information

David McDiarmid was a queer artist, designer and activist, born in Hobart, and lived between Melbourne, Sydney and New York. McDiarmid’s art practice was kaleidoscopic, celebratory and political.

This artwork, Untitled (T-shirt), was presented to Stephen Allkins, a pioneering Sydney DJ, as a gift of the artist. The front of the t-shirt includes the letters for the word, STEPHEN, and the numbers for the year it was made, 84, while the back of the t-shirt includes the letters for the word, SYDNEY.

The period in which this artwork was produced was a particularly tumultuous time. The HIV/AIDS epidemic emerged in the early 1980s and rapidly became a global public health emergency. McDiarmid was living in New York at the time, witnessing the forefront of epidemic and with his community deeply affected, and friends and lovers dying, he “suspected he was HIV-Positive…[and] would be dead with two years”.

McDiarmid was an important figure in gay activism in Melbourne and Sydney-based protests for gay rights and was one of the original activists for of the first Sydney Mardi Gras Parade in 1978. Later he served as designer and then artistic director for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (1988-1990) and, in 1992, produced a series of posters for the AIDS Council of New South Wales.

McDiarmid advocated for artists’ intellectual property, presenting at Sydney Writers' Festival and the Arts Law Centre of Australia on the management of artists’ estates in the face of HIV/AIDS epidemic.