Gran Fury

Emerging from ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in 1988, Gran Fury was an AIDS activist artist collective from New York City consisting of 11 members including: Richard Elovich, Avram Finkelstein, Amy Heard, Tom Kalin, John Lindell, Loring McAlpin, Marlene McCarty, Donald Moffett, Michael Nesline, Mark Simpson and Robert Vazquez-Pacheco.

[5] Gran Fury organized as an autonomous collective, describing themselves as a "...band of individuals united in anger and dedicated to exploiting the power of art to end the AIDS crisis.

"[6] Before social media, the collective's appropriation of mass-media language and use of various materials including: fliers, posters, stickers, T-shirts, billboards, photographs and postcards, simultaneously produced provocative, informative, stylish, political and satirical public projects.

[10] By placing "...political information into environments where people are less accustomed to finding it..." articulates member Avram Finkelstein, catches the viewer off guard, revealing a new vocabulary and a new perspective on the AIDS health crisis.

The pink triangle was appropriated from the Nazi marker for gay men imprisoned at death camps furthering the analogy between the AIDS crisis and the Holocaust.

Concrete slabs positioned under each figure offered evidence of their crimes, from misrepresentations of AIDS to ignoring the issue altogether as in the case of Reagan's notorious public silence, in the form of personal quotes.

Typical of media indifference to the underlying issue, a May 28 New York Times report on the piece wrote "In fact, much of the talk about the Aperto among the hundreds of artists, curators, dealers and critics who have converged on this city during the last week has focused on two entries from the United States that have stirred interest more for their apparent capacity to shock than for anything else.

The collective aimed to push various individuals such as Ronald Reagan, then New York Mayor Ed Koch, and John Cardinal O'Connor to address the AIDS pandemic in a more practical, open way, as well as to inform the public on the importance of safer sex and clean needles.

When asked about their approach of their work, Gran Fury said: "We want the art world to recognize that collective direct action will bring an end to the AIDS crisis.

In the piece, presented at the New Museum, Gran Fury stated that the original agitprop art strategies they were using were ‘unable to communicate the complexities of AIDS issues'.

There were also projections of "Kissing Doesn't Kills" video public service announcements, and several give-aways including "Men use Condoms" stickers in an edition of 3000 and postcards from the "Read My Lips" series.

[17] In April 2022, Bold Type Books published a history of Gran Fury by Jack Lowery entitled, It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic.