From 1988–1995, Gran Fury unleashed a public art campaign against the power brokers that allowed AIDS to ravage the nation. The New York–based activist artist collective, which emerged at the start of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), adopted a DIY grassroots ethos to change the ways people thought about the deadly pandemic that was being used by Christofascists to destroy the LGBTQ community just two decades after Stonewall.
From the outset, Gran Fury acknowledged reality for what it was. In a 1988 poster designed for The Kitchen, an independent experimental art and performance space in New York, Gran Fury decried, “With 42,000 Dead, Art Is Not Enough. Take Collective Direct Action to End the AIDS Crisis.”
It was a call to arms among comrades to step up and stand shoulder to shoulder against a government that would sooner see you dead from a virus that is only now, nearly 40 years later, finally under control. But what is this now in 2025, when SARS Cov-2 — a new virus whose central feature is also T cell death — has resulted in more than 30 million dead and 5% of the global population (400 million) disabled in just five years?
As today the Donald Trump regime fast tracks the collapse of the United States’ social foundations starting with the destruction of the National Institute of Health and the Center of Disease Control, the nation once again aligns itself with the open embrace of fascism. Perhaps what is needed now more than ever is a roadmap to resistance.
Let the record show
Enter Gran Fury: Art Is Not Enough, a visual history of the legendary collective that used propaganda to speak truth to power to a government that used the AIDS pandemic to enact the latest chapter of a longstanding eugenics campaign against Black, Latine, queer, disabled, and unhoused communities.
In 1987, with the understanding that art is an action, rather than an object, members of ACT UP understood the medium is the message. Tapping into the language of advertising and graphic design, they crafted campaigns that could be deployed across street art, protest art, and public art, their endless multiplicity only increasingly its power.
The same year, a simple black poster started to appear on the streets of New York, the words “SILENCE=DEATH” in knockout text screaming below a luminous pink triangle, the Nazi symbol for homosexual persecution later rebranded in the 1960s as an emblem of gay liberation. The impact was immediate, the implications visceral.
After seeing the poster, William R. Olander (1950–1989), then curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York was moved to act. “For anyone conversant with this iconography, there was nob question this was a poster designed to provoke and heighten awareness of the AIDS crisis,” Olander later wrote. “To me, it was more than that: it was among the most significant works of art that had yet been done which was inspired and produced within the arms of the crisis.”
Olander, who would died from AIDS just two years later, was impelled to act. He approached ACT UP with an offer they could not refuse: their Broadway facing window. Some 50 people came together to create the 1987 piece titled Let the Record Show. The piece neon signage reading SILENCE=DEATH under a pink triangle set into a recessed arch, floating alluringly above a series of black and white portraits of some of the nation’s most strident eugenicists like President Ronald Reagan, US Senator Jesse Helms, televangelist Jerry Falwell paired with their own hysterical ravings about AIDS.
Kissing doesn’t kill
Let the Record Show set the bar: the systems of power would be called to task for their crimes, again and again, the public implicated as witness and like curator William R. Olander, called to resist. When the project was completed, the group met again. Brought together by the desire to do more, Gran Fury was born.
“We went from being wheat pasting hooligans to suddenly having real resources and opportunities and a platform from which to speak. This brought about a crisis of conscience in discussing how to articulate the group because the stakes had been raised,” Tom Kalin says in Gran Fury: Art Is Not Enough.
Kalin, alongside fellow founding members Richard Elovich, Avram Finkelstein, Amy Heard, John Lindell, Loring McAlpin, Marlene McCarty, Donald Moffett, Michael Nesline, Mark Simpson and Robert Vazquez-Pacheco, would reach a new level with Kissing Doesn’t Kill (1989–90), a public art campaign that paired heterosexual, gay, and lesbian couples delightfully lip locked everywhere you might expect to encounter commercial advertising.
The photographs, which called to mind Oliviero Toscani’s contemporaneous Benetton ads, were at once joyful, provocative, and wholly innocent — making visible what had long been erased from view. It was a reminder that amid the grief, rage, and struggle, love was still worth fighting for.
Gran Fury: Art Is Not Enough is published by Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand/KMEC Books, and available for $39.95.
