Inducted in 2025
Arts Executive 
Advocate & Community Organizer
Co-Founder, Visual AIDS, New York, NY
Co-Founder, AIDS Red Ribbon Initiative, Worldwide

In December 1996, Patrick O’Connell, Class of 1971, at the invitation of a young
teacher in the English Department, Mr. Anthony Day (the current President of Fordham Prep) spoke to a group of students in the Hall of Honor during a prayer service for those whose lives had been affected by or lost to the AIDS epidemic, still one of the leading causes of death nationwide in the mid-1990s. The service marked the anniversary of the Day without Art, organized by O’Connell himself in December of 1990 to bring awareness to the crisis and its victims. Patrick, who had been living with HIV since the late 1970s, spoke honestly and frankly, addressing the realities of living with the disease, of having lost scores of friends to it, and of the pain caused by the social stigma associated with HIV in those days, and the lack of compassion often faced by victims on every front.

O’Connell’s enduring message that day: indifference kills, and among a community who called themselves “Men for Others,” indifference ought never find a home.

Patrick J. O’Connell was born on April 12, 1953, and grew up in StuyTown in New York City. His father, Daniel O’Connell, was a metal worker, and his mother, Helen Barry O’Connell, worked in the cafeterias at various Catholic institutions. His brother, Barry, had made it uptown to Rose Hill a few years before him, graduating the Prep as a member of the Class of 1968.

Interestingly, Patrick’s association with “Fordham” began early — before kindergarten even. As was common for city boys and girls in those days, O’Connell spent his childhood summers at a camp in the Catskills: Camp Fordham, to be precise, a Catholic boys’ camp not directly connected to the Prep or University, but certainly one that capitalized on the name, even using maroon and white as its team designations.

Young Patrick attended the School of the Immaculate Conception in Manhattan, graduating in 1967 before heading up to the Bronx to begin his
own time at the Prep that September. During his Hughes Hall years, O’Connell swam — a great love of his born and fostered during all those lakeside summers upstate — and also took to the tennis courts. Tennis would always be a great love. He also wrote for The Rampart, was a big part of the annual Christmas Toy Drive, even co-chairing the event as an upperclassman, and, tellingly, was particularly devoted to the hospital outreach of the Prep’s Christian Action Program, the forerunner of our Christian Service Program today, bringing moments of light to the lonely and the suffering.

Graduating the Prep, Patrick would attend Trinity College in Connecticut. He majored in Classics with a particular emphasis on Greco-Roman art and architecture. It was during his college years, both in Hartford and abroad in Rome, that O’Connell would begin to find himself a permanent connection to the art world.

After college, Patrick would work for Artists Space, a non-profit gallery and arts organization, as well as Hallwalls, a similar institution in Buffalo. He eventually settled back in the City by the late 1970s, and began to establish himself as a dynamic member of the New York art scene.

It was during this time that a vicious street attack nearly left Patrick dead, surviving only because of the multiple surgeries and transfusions he received at the hospital.

In the late 1970s, however, HIV had not yet entered mainstream medical consciousness, and blood would not have been routinely screened for the virus. It was during the transfusions, in O’Connell’s estimation, that he contracted the disease that would come to ravage society in the decade that followed.

Recovering from the assault, Patrick found that his new life would be a daily struggle against the disease, surviving and living with AIDS long past medical expectations of the day. And more than just the physical difficulties, there were the social realities of living with a disease that was often met with fear, bigotry, and a sometimes appalling lack of support—and the physiological toll of living through an epidemic that ravaged whole communities and struck down so many, often in the prime of their lives.

In response to his situation, the defiant and sharpwitted O’Connell chose not to just lay back and die — a remark he certainly would have appreciated with all its implications. Instead he chose to become an advocate for those stricken with the disease, in particular those, whom Patrick often noted, who were far worse off than he: those without the same supportive circle of friends and colleagues, those not fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to battle the illness and survive as he had.

In late 1988, Patrick O’Connell became one of the founders of VisualAIDS, an organization dedicated to raising awareness and confronting the AIDS Crisis through visual art, as well as supporting artists living with HIV, and honoring and remembering those lost to the disease. In December of the following year, O’Connell launched the Day Without Art, one of the most powerful initiatives to date to shine a light on the global tragedy.

Two years later, Patrick would become one of the minds behind the now-iconic AIDS Ribbon. Its historic international unveiling would be at the Tony Awards in 1991, when he arranged for volunteers to place a ribbon on every seat. Even the event’s host, actor Jeremy Irons, wore one on his lapel for the broadcast. Overnight, the simple red ribbon became a part of global consciousness. As O’Connell was quoted as saying: “People want to say something, not necessarily with anger and confrontation all the time. This allows them — and, even if it is only an easy first step, that’s great with me. It won’t be their last.”

In the years that followed, Patrick would continue his work, tirelessly calling for compassion for all those touched by the disease, and for research for treatments and prevention.

In 1999, O’Connell’s alma mater, Trinity, granted him an honorary doctorate for his advocacy work as well as his accomplishments as an administrator of art non-profit organizations.

His story was spotlighted in the 2013 documentary Let The Record Show.

Patrick James O’Connell passed away in March of 2021 of AIDS-related complications. He was 67. He had lived 40 years with strength and dignity in the face of what seemed an automatic death sentence decades before. He left behind many close friends and associates in the art and advocacy worlds, as well as his wife, Solveig “Sola” Bjarnadóttir-O’Connell, a writer, editor, and scholar of Icelandic literature.

Today, in November 2025, Patrick O’Connell, Class of 1971, by the authority of Mr. Anthony Day, president of Fordham Prep, is inducted into the Prep’s Hall of Honor. His enduring message: indifference kills, and among a community who calls themselves “Men for Others,” indifference ought never find a home — then, now, or ever.