Cory Roberts-Auli (April 10, 1963 - March 10, 1996) described himself as a gay mixed-heritage Latino. He was of Puerto Rican and Irish descent and grew up in New Jersey. He would later move to New York City at the age of 16. He was a self-taught artist who worked in painting from 1990-1996. At the beginning of his career, his paintings were traditional, using oils and acrylics. He would add other materials, such as medical supplies, to the canvas through the years. His artwork eventually incorporated HIV-infected blood and other bodily fluids as pigments. He co-created and co-edited Infected Faggot Perspectives, a zine distributed in the U.S. and Germany, where he lived towards the end of his life. The zine is composed of collage, photography, and written word.

The exhibition "The New Shrouds of Turin: The Plague Years" was conceived by Cory Roberts-Auli, in collaboration with photographer Luz Calvo. It was a series of portraits that represented the realities of nine people living with AIDS. The exhibition program states: "Impressing the blood of these individuals on fabric and documenting this process in photos, the artists seek to bring the viewer into direct visual, tactile, olfactory contact with the body in the extremity of in the extremity of disease.

Blood--the literal life and death, the vessel of disease itself--is here taken out of the body and displayed. Viewers are almost compelled to experience the panic that comes from contact with the body fluids and the persons of these nine people living and dying with AIDS. The women, men and one child on the canvases have a variety of harrowing experiences to relate. In dealing with the Plague that has descended on their lives, they pause and offer us a glimpse.

This art creates new relics, new Shrouds, and substitutes itself for the cliches of religious imagery, reinscribing AIDS within the Western discourse of martyrdom and transcendence. In doing so, the portraits confront the moral posturing that has been used to isolate and oppress people living and dying with AIDS. The News Shrouds do not represent, they are a repudiation of the stigmatization that has been responsible for perpetuating the spread of HIV epidemic and the deaths of too many people worldwide."

(Part of this biography was adapted from an artist bio posted on Visual AIDS, a contemporary arts organization that raises AIDS awareness and encourages dialogue around HIV issues.)