Andy Fabo

Andy Fabo (b. 1953, Calgary) is an artist, art critic, independent curator, AIDS activist, and art educator. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Calgary and the Alberta College of Art before moving to Toronto in 1975. He received his MFA from OCAD University in 2013.

Fabo’s paintings, drawings, and videos have exhibited widely nationally and internationally. In 2005 he had a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art that featured over thirty years of work. The exhibition spanned the first mixed media paintings that he exhibited in his 1979 A Space show, Studs– a landmark for Queer art in Toronto- through the paintings from his time as a founding member of the influential ChromaZone collective (1981-85), through his activist and memorializing response to the AIDS epidemic of the late 80s and early 90s. In the former period Fabo began to make collaborative videos with his late partner, Michael Balser, and also expanded his practice into digital media. The video he made with Balser, Survival of the Delirious (1988), won numerous awards including ‘Best New Narrative’ at the Atlanta Film Festival and Kijkhuis Festival in Holland. It is also included in the Art Against AIDS anthology that V Tape in Toronto and Video Data Bank in Chicago co-produced. A retrospective of their collaborative work mounted at Oboro, Montréal in 2003.