June 28, 2024
Communication
“Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.”
"This postcard, produced for a nine-day nationwide protest in May 1988, was one of Gran Fury’s earliest designs. The nationally-based AIDS Coalition to Network, Organize, and Win called for the demonstrations, but left decisions about the focus of the protests to local AIDS groups. One of the events organized by ACT UP was a same-sex kiss-in, meant as a challenge to homophobia. Gran Fury made a number of different posters, postcards, and T-shirts to publicize the spring action, including this photograph of two females kissing. A year later, the same image would be paired with the text: 'Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.'" - Christopher George
"This postcard, produced for a nine-day nationwide protest in May 1988, was one of Gran Fury’s earliest designs. The nationally-based AIDS Coalition to Network, Organize, and Win called for the demonstrations, but left decisions about the focus of the protests to local AIDS groups. One of the events organized by ACT UP was a same-sex kiss-in, meant as a challenge to homophobia. Gran Fury made a number of different posters, postcards, and T-shirts to publicize the spring action, including this photograph of two females kissing. A year later, the same image would be paired with the text: 'Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.'" - Christopher George
"This postcard, produced for a nine-day nationwide protest in May 1988, was one of Gran Fury’s earliest designs. The nationally-based AIDS Coalition to Network, Organize, and Win called for the demonstrations, but left decisions about the focus of the protests to local AIDS groups. One of the events organized by ACT UP was a same-sex kiss-in, meant as a challenge to homophobia. Gran Fury made a number of different posters, postcards, and T-shirts to publicize the spring action, including this photograph of two females kissing. A year later, the same image would be paired with the text: 'Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.'" - Christopher George
ARTICLE: Gran Fury
"Long before Facebook and Twitter made getting a message out to a mass audience as simple as a couple of clicks, the art/activist collective known as Gran Fury used a heady combination of bold graphic design, guerrilla dissemination tactics, and art institutional support to communicate the urgency of the AIDS epidemic in light of disastrous government and political inaction.
"Probably best known for the SILENCE = DEATH graphic that came to define the AIDS/HIV activist movement in the 1980s and early 1990s, Gran Fury was a group of artists and visual provocateurs affiliated with the New York City-based ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power)." - John d'Addario
