It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful
How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize
The story of art collective Gran Fury—which fought back during the AIDS crisis through direct action and community-made propaganda—offers lessons in love and grief.
In the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was annihilating queer people, intravenous drug users, and communities of color in America, and disinformation about the disease ran rampant. Out of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an art collective that called itself Gran Fury formed to campaign against corporate greed, government inaction, stigma, and public indifference to the epidemic.
Writer Jack Lowery examines Gran Fury’s art and activism from iconic images like the “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster to the act of dropping piles of fake bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Lowery offers a complex, moving portrait of a collective and its members, who built essential solidarities with each other and whose lives evidenced the profound trauma of enduring the AIDS crisis.
Gran Fury and ACT UP’s strategies are still used frequently by the activists leading contemporary movements. In an era when structural violence and the devastation of COVID-19 continue to target the most vulnerable, this belief in the power of public art and action persists.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Editor Lowery debuts with a fascinating study of how art galvanized AIDS activism in the 1980s and '90s. He documents how a small group of activists in New York City developed the symbol of a pink triangle on a black background accompanied by the text "Silence=Death" in 1985 and how the advocacy group ACT UP raised funds by selling T-shirts and buttons emblazoned with the graphic. The image's "widespread acceptance," Lowery writes, "also articulated that a community actually existed." Other early artworks associated with ACT UP included a Pride parade float designed to look like a concentration camp and a 1987 installation at the New Museum of Contemporary Art that was inspired by the Nuremberg trials. The group behind that exhibit became Gran Fury, an affiliate of ACT UP New York focused on art. Lowery thrillingly recounts Gran Fury's use of advertising-influenced "slick aesthetic" art as protest propaganda, including the insertion of a fake front page into real editions of the New York Times and "Kissing Doesn't Kill" posters plastered on buses in New York City and San Francisco. Throughout, Lowery provides crucial context about the history of the AIDS epidemic and draws vivid sketches of key players in Gran Fury. The result is a captivating look at the power of art as a political tool.
