I think that this work will affect different people differently.

It will move some people, it will anger some people.

I think probably very few leave the gallery unaffected in one way or the other.

AIDS, The Artist's Response, is an exhibit of work showing in the Ohio State University's Hoyt Sherman Gallery until April 16th.

The art was collected from artists around the country.

The subject matter, a deadly disease that is still rampant and without cure, helps make the exhibit unsettling.

There are 49,000 people who have died from the disease, as we stand here and speak.

When the exhibition was first conceived, there were only 17,000 who had died.

The World Health Organization estimates that between 50 and 100 million people worldwide are infected with the virus.

So what this show hopes to do is, at least in some way, raise people's awareness.

One of the exhibit's pieces depicts an empty rocking chair and an old front porch.

One of artists who created the piece is Mark Sveed, who also assisted with the curatorial work of the It came about in response to an article that appeared in the Columbus Dispatch, and it was a well-intentioned article, I think, but very insensitively worded.

And the headline of the article said, doctors' plea, give care to AIDS patients or let them die.

And then that was that kind of either or, simply make a choice, like making choice on road maintenance.

In the November ballot, that sort of just yes or no attitude was reinforced in the article.

And it's an article that made people with AIDS in Columbus very uneasy.

Much of the exhibit simply shows the faces of people with AIDS.

There is a kind of resurgence in what we call the concerned photojournalism.

So you see a lot of portraits of PWAs or people with AIDS.

Within those portraits, there's a gamut of responses.

There is work by Nicholas Nixon which shows a man almost near death, or shows him through the stages of dying.

And then there are also.

Portraits of people that, if they weren't contextualized in this AIDS exhibition, you would never think that they were sick.

So those portraits are really an answer to the media's idea of what AIDS is, or what people with AIDS look like.

Sick, dying, almost in the grave people as opposed to people living still sort of vital healthy lives.

Some of the exhibit is sexually explicit, with a few pieces raising ominous warnings about sex.

And much of the exhibit is angry, especially angry at political figures.

When you've had one friend who's died from AIDS, perhaps you do a memorial piece.

When you lost 10 or 15 or 20 friends and acquaintances, by then you're pretty angry.

And thus you see a little bit of a difference between work done by Midwestern artists and work done coastal artists, because there's a big difference between the epidemic in Columbus than in coastal cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York.

And really what I feel like the bottom line for me is that we're in the business of trying to save lives here and I hope that the show, whether people come here and hate it or come here and love it, will begin to think about what they do.