Stylogenyin the style of ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics

Counterculture · 1987–1995 · North America

ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics

Also known as Gran Fury, SILENCE=DEATH graphics, ACT UP graphics

The graphics of New York's AIDS activist movement: the SILENCE=DEATH poster of 1987, a pink triangle above white capitals on black, and the posters, stickers, T-shirts, billboards and bus ads of Gran Fury (1988–1995), ACT UP's 'unofficial propaganda ministry'. Professional offset print and the language of Madison Avenue (staged photographs, one-line slogans, facts in small print) were placed where advertising goes, to accuse government, church, press and drug companies of letting people with AIDS die.

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A black-and-white close-up shows a hand holding a bottle labeled HIV medication with a price of $2,800 per month. Below it, an oversized black headline on a bright pink band reads “PROFITS KILL,” followed by statistics and demands for lower drug prices.
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the style’s design choices. Not a real or historical work.

Use it with care

These are the graphics of a movement of gay men, lesbians and people with AIDS who were burying their friends, and many of their makers and subjects are living or died of AIDS (Mark Simpson, who appears in Kissing Doesn't Kill, died in 1996; Oliver Johnston in 1990); HIV remains a global health issue and ACT UP is still active. The pink triangle recalls the homosexual prisoners of the Nazi camps and was turned to point up as 'a disavowal of victimhood' (in Finkelstein's account; the Henry Ford's history says the inversion began as a mistake that the collective kept): do not use it, the SILENCE=DEATH equation or the kissing couples as decoration, Pride merchandise or brand campaigns, since the style was made to turn advertising against corporate greed, and do not picture people with HIV as victims or as a threat. SILENCE=DEATH is © 1987 The Silence = Death Project, which lent it to ACT UP (the poster reads 'Used by permission by ACT-UP'); Gran Fury's website declares its own artwork public domain, but the photographed people and quoted brands are not: write your own slogan and stage your own photograph, and never present a generated image as a period work.

01

How it works

  • Speak in the voice of advertising and public information: polished offset print, staged or press photographs and a one-line slogan, placed where ads go (bus sides, subway cards, billboards, bus shelters, newspaper boxes, stickers and T-shirts) so the message meets the public among commercial messages rather than in a gallery.
  • Put the accusation in the copy: a short declarative sentence in heavy sans capitals, most often Futura Extra Bold, Extra Bold Oblique or Extra Bold Condensed, often in a bar laid across the photograph, that names who is responsible or turns a harmless picture into a charge, as in 'The Government Has Blood On Its Hands' beside a red handprint, 'Read My Lips' across two kissing sailors or 'Women Don't Get AIDS, They Just Die From It' over a line of beauty-pageant contestants.
  • Back the slogan with facts in smaller print: statistics, agency names and demands set under or between the lines of the headline, so the poster reads at a glance from across the street and argues its case to anyone who comes closer, as in the orange block demanding that the CDC widen its definition of AIDS in Women Don't Get AIDS, the strip blaming 'Corporate Greed, Government Inaction And Public Indifference' under Kissing Doesn't Kill, or the English and Spanish text of AIDS: 1 in 61.
  • Reduce the cause to one reclaimed sign and repeat it like a logo: the pink triangle of the Nazi camps, turned to point up, alone on a black field above an equation in white capitals, carried on posters, stickers, buttons, T-shirts and neon.
  • Borrow the formats of those you attack, keep their finish and take the source's typography with it: pastiche a Benetton campaign, a New York Times front page, a stock catchphrase ('Read my lips'), Nike's 'Just do it', Coca-Cola's 'Enjoy' or Robert Indiana's LOVE, and let the subversion lie in what the words say; Kissing Doesn't Kill sets its line in blue serif caps and small caps above studio photographs on white, like a Benetton advertisement, and Welcome to America uses letterspaced red capitals over a studio photograph of a baby.
  • Show bodies and desire plainly instead of victims: same-sex and interracial couples kissing, an erect penis beside the Pope, handprints in red paint for blood.

New York City. The six-member SILENCE = DEATH Project (Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione and Jorge Socarrás), a consciousness-raising and support group formed in the mid-1980s and inspired by the posters of the Art Workers' Coalition and the Guerrilla Girls, designed its poster in 1986 and pasted it around Manhattan in early 1987, just before ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was founded in March 1987; the collective gave the poster to ACT UP. ACT UP's window 'Let the Record Show…' at the New Museum on Broadway in 1987 led some of its makers to form Gran Fury in January 1988 as ACT UP's 'unofficial propaganda ministry and guerilla graphic designers'; several members came from graphic design and advertising, and the collective disbanded in 1995. Its influences included Barbara Kruger's declarative captions in Futura Bold Oblique over found black-and-white photographs (Helen Molesworth linked Gran Fury's frequent Futura to Kruger), Jenny Holzer's Truisms, pasted anonymously around Manhattan and later shown on public signs, and Situationist détournement: the collective places its work 'in direct line of descent with Situationist questions'. This entry covers the SILENCE=DEATH Project, Gran Fury and ACT UP's in-house offset posters such as Avram Finkelstein's; ACT UP also published work outside this idiom, such as Keith Haring's cartoon IGNORANCE = FEAR, SILENCE = DEATH (1989), and its committees made their own agitprop; neither, nor ACT UP's graphics after 1995, is covered here

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Hand-lettering, Ornamented display, Experimental & distorted, Abundant decoration, Floral & vegetal, Comic & cartoon, Painterly brushwork, Calm & contemplative

Palette

  • #0f0f0f
  • #ffffff
  • #f06ea9
  • #c8102e
  • #1d4e9e
  • #8a5ca6

Typefaces

  • Gill Sans Bold Extra Condensed in white capitals reversed out of black for SILENCE=DEATH (1987), settled on after months in which the collective 'argued about issues, images and fonts'

  • Futura Extra Bold, Extra Bold Oblique and Extra Bold Condensed in black or white

    often in a bar across a photograph, a habit Helen Molesworth linked to Barbara Kruger (Read My Lips, 1988; AIDS: 1 in 61, 1988; Avram Finkelstein's Fact or Fiction?, 1989), with heavy condensed grotesque capitals over a duotone in Women Don't Get AIDS (1991)

  • Classical serif capitals and small caps taken from the fashion advertising being copied

    blue on white above the photographs in Kissing Doesn't Kill (1989), with the caption in flared sans caps and small caps reversed out of a blue strip; letterspaced red capitals over the studio baby of Welcome to America (1989)

  • Facts and demands in a serif or a smaller bold sans under the slogan

    (English and Spanish serif text with bold Futura punchlines in AIDS: 1 in 61; orange capitals between the two halves of Women Don't Get AIDS), with the ACT UP and Gran Fury credit lines in type so small it is hard to read even up close, and a small script 'Gran Fury' logotype as the collective's signature

  • The New York Times front page (masthead, columns and headlines) mimicked for The New York Crimes

    1989

Known for

  • SILENCE = DEATH Project

    (Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, Jorge Socarrás), SILENCE=DEATH, 1987, offset lithograph, 85.2 × 55.7 cm (Brooklyn Museum 1998.109; another copy at The Henry Ford, THF179775): a pink triangle on a black field above the slogan in white capitals and a line of small print, later reprinted by ACT UP as a fundraiser with minor errors corrected (the 'Federal Drug Administration' became the Food and Drug Administration) and '© 1987 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power' added

  • ACT UP, 'Let the Record Show…', installation in the New Museum's Broadway window, New York, 1987

    a neon SILENCE=DEATH sign above cardboard silhouettes of six public figures set against a mural-sized photograph of the Nuremberg trials; the neon is in the New Museum's collection and was shown again in the Bowery window in 2012

  • Gran Fury, AIDS

    1 in 61, 1988, offset lithograph in black on white, 56.3 × 43.1 cm (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2018.224), for ACT UP's demonstration at Cosmopolitan magazine: the collective's first poster, bilingual in English and Spanish, a Futura headline over large serif text naming Black and Hispanic babies, bold Futura punchlines ('STOP RACISM: FIGHT AIDS.') and a halftoned doll on white, signed in tiny type 'Gran Fury is a band of individuals united in anger and committed to exploiting the power of art to end the AIDS crisis'

  • Gran Fury, The Government Has Blood On Its Hands / One AIDS Death Every Half Hour

    1988, offset posters with a red handprint on white for ACT UP's demonstration at the New York City Department of Health, with versions addressed to Mayor Ed Koch ('You've Got Blood On Your Hands, Ed Koch. NYC AIDS Care Doesn't Exist.') and to Stephen Joseph, and matching 3 × 3 in. stickers

  • Gran Fury, Read My Lips, 1988, photocopied posters

    (16¾ × 10¾ in.) for ACT UP's Spring AIDS Action '88, and silkscreened T-shirts for ACT UP: a photograph of two sailors kissing, reproduced as a coarse photocopied halftone, for the men's version and images from the 1890s and 1920s for two women's versions, under the catchphrase 'READ MY LIPS' in Futura Extra Bold Oblique in a white bar, announcing the kiss-in of Friday 29 April 1988; MASP's texts connect it to George H. W. Bush's 'Read my lips: no new taxes', a line he made famous at the Republican convention on 18 August 1988, four months after the kiss-in

  • Gran Fury, Kissing Doesn't Kill

    Greed and Indifference Do, 1989–1990, four-colour bus poster in three panels (30 × 140 in.) for 'Art Against AIDS on the Road' (sponsored by amfAR, with Creative Time): three couples of various races, two men, two women and a man and a woman, kissing in the manner of a United Colors of Benetton advertisement, on buses and in subway stations in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Washington, DC (offset poster versions at the V&A, E.472-1993, and the Delaware Art Museum, 2020-60)

  • Gran Fury, The New York Crimes, 1989

    a four-page web-offset newsprint paper mimicking the front page of The New York Times, swapped into New York Times news boxes for ACT UP's Target City Hall demonstration

  • Gran Fury, Welcome to America, 1989, billboard

    (10½ × 23 ft) at Broadway and Houston Street for the Whitney Museum's 'Image World: Art and Media Culture': letterspaced red capitals over a studio photograph of a baby on white, calling the United States 'the only industrialized country besides South Africa without national healthcare'

03

Make something in this style

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04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This styleACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics1987–1995 · North America

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

No later style in the atlas grew out of it yet.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Sources

  1. Brooklyn Museum, SILENCE = DEATH Project, 'SILENCE=DEATH', 1987, 1998.109 (https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/159258: the six members; founded to support one another in the AIDS crisis; inspired by the Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Girls; pink triangle as a reference to Nazi persecution; adopted by ACT UP; offset lithograph, 85.2 × 55.7 cm, printer O'Connell Graphics; '© 1987 The Silence = Death Project. Used by permission by ACT-UP')
  2. Wikipedia: 'Silence=Death Project' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silence%3DDeath_Project: founded 1985 as a consciousness-raising and support group; rejected photographic imagery as exclusionary; poster created 1986 and on the streets in March 1987; errors in the first printing's small print ('Center for Disease Control', 'Federal Drug Administration'); rights given to ACT UP, which reprinted it)
  3. The Henry Ford, 'Silence = Death: The Early Fight Against the AIDS Epidemic' (https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/articles/silence-equals-death-the-early-fight-against-the-aids-epidemic: six months of design debate over background colour and text; black background, bright pink triangle and white text; the inversion of the triangle 'was initially a mistake' that the collective embraced; poster on Manhattan streets by March 1987; artifact THF179775; rights given to ACT UP, which reprinted it as a fundraiser with minor errors corrected, 'Federal Drug Administration' for the Food and Drug Administration, and '© 1987 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power' added; Keith Haring's IGNORANCE = FEAR, SILENCE = DEATH poster designed for ACT UP in 1989, THF179776)
  4. Fonts In Use, 'Silence=Death poster' (https://fontsinuse.com/uses/19069/silence-death-poster: Gill Sans Bold Extra Condensed; artwork published December 1986; Finkelstein's account that the group 'argued about issues, images and fonts' and inverted the triangle 'as a gesture of a disavowal of victimhood')
  5. Jasmine Kuylenstierna, 'Queer Activist Art: Gran Fury's weapons of mass production', The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Perspectives, 7 June 2024 (https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/act-up-gran-fury: Gran Fury formed January 1988 as ACT UP's 'unofficial propaganda ministry and guerilla graphic designers'; ACT UP founded March 1987; core members; members with backgrounds in graphic design and advertising; Kissing Doesn't Kill imitating a United Colors of Benetton ad; AIDS: 1 in 61 as the first poster, its mixed fonts and its small-print statement; the Washington Post's 'best-merchandised revolution in town'; Venice Biennale 1990; dissolution in 1995 and Good Luck… Miss You)
  6. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gran Fury, 'AIDS: 1 in 61', 1988, 2018.224 (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/786125: offset lithograph on paper, 56.3 × 43.1 cm; Gran Fury active 1988–1995)
  7. Gran Fury, 'List of Work', 'About' and work pages (https://www.granfury.org/list-of-work, https://www.granfury.org/about, https://www.granfury.org/read-my-lips, https://www.granfury.org/women-dont-get-aids, https://www.granfury.org/welcome-to-america, https://www.granfury.org/the-government-has-blood-on-its-hands, https://www.granfury.org/kissing-doesnt-kill: dates, media, sizes and venues of the works, including AIDS: 1 in 61 for the Cosmopolitan demonstration, the photocopied Read My Lips and Spring AIDS Action '88 posters and the Read My Lips T-shirts 'For ACTUP', the three offset versions of The Government Has Blood On Its Hands, The New York Crimes as web-offset newsprint, the three-panel four-colour Kissing Doesn't Kill bus poster and its 30-second PSAs, the 10½ × 23 ft Welcome to America billboard, RIOT as oil and dried pigment on canvas and a later sticker, The Pope and the Penis as '2 billboards & 1 text panel', the Women Just Don't Get AIDS bus-shelter sign and the Good Luck, Miss You handbill; appropriation strategies that used and critiqued 'Madison Avenue vernaculars' and work 'in direct line of descent with Situationist questions'; scans and street photographs showing the Futura Extra Bold Oblique bar and 'KISS IN Friday, April 29' of Read My Lips, the purple duotone and orange small print of Women Don't Get AIDS, the red letterspaced capitals and 'besides South Africa' line of Welcome to America, the Ed Koch handprint poster on white, and the script 'Gran Fury' signature)
  8. Wikipedia: 'Gran Fury' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Fury: Let the Record Show… with a neon SILENCE=DEATH sign and silhouettes of six public figures against a Nuremberg trials photograph in the New Museum's Broadway window; members; the Pope piece at the 1990 Venice Biennale; Good Luck… Miss You (1995); 'Gran Fury: Read My Lips' at NYU's 80WSE gallery, 2012; Gran Fury Collection at the New York Public Library)
  9. New Museum Digital Archive, 'ACT UP (Gran Fury), SILENCE=DEATH', 25 April – 24 June 2012 (https://archive.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/1554: ACT UP formed March 1987; William Olander invited ACT UP to make a window installation at the museum's downtown location, which became Let the Record Show…; the 1987 neon re-installed facing the Bowery)
  10. Victoria and Albert Museum, Gran Fury, 'Kissing Doesn't Kill. Greed and Indifference Do.', 1989, E.472-1993 (https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O76239: colour offset lithograph, 293 × 941 mm; three couples of various races, man and woman, man and man, woman and woman; white lettering on a blue strip; published by ACT UP, sponsored by AmFAR; for public transport in New York and San Francisco; the Kiss-In tactic) and V&A blog 'Out on Display #11: Kissing Doesn't Kill' (https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum-life/out-on-display-11-kissing-doesnt-kill: reminiscent of a 'United Colours of Benetton' campaign; work placed in public spaces normally dominated by commercial media)
  11. Delaware Art Museum, Gran Fury, 'Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.', 1989, 2020-60 (https://emuseum.delart.org/objects/24465/kissing-doesnt-kill-greed-and-indifference-do: offset lithograph, 28.6 × 94 cm; name from the Plymouth Gran Fury police car; Creative Time's Art Against AIDS On the Road; postcards mailed, then posters on buses in New York, San Francisco and other cities; borrowing the look of fashion brands such as Benetton)
  12. MASP, 'Gran Fury: arte não é o bastante', exhibition texts, curated by André Mesquita (https://assets.masp.org.br/pdf/ca_gran_furry_0703.pdf: The New York Crimes mimicking the New York Times front page and swapped into its news boxes; Kissing Doesn't Kill subverting Benetton's visual codes, with members of Gran Fury and ACT UP as the couples, on buses and subway stations in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Washington; Read My Lips with a photograph of two sailors and women's versions from images of the 1890s and 1920s, after Bush's 'Read my lips: no new taxes'; RIOT after General Idea's AIDS and Robert Indiana's LOVE; The Government Has Blood On Its Hands versions for Ed Koch and Stephen Joseph; Welcome to America billboard at Broadway and Houston for the Whitney's Image World; The Pope and the Penis held at customs in Venice; Women Don't Get AIDS text on the CDC definition; the SILENCE=DEATH triangle pointing up on a black field)
  13. Harvard Magazine, 'From AIDS Activism to Art' (November 2009; https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/from-aids-to-art: The Government Has Blood on Its Hands and Read My Lips, both 1988, offset lithography, from the Avram Finkelstein collection, in 'ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993' at the Carpenter Center)
  14. Gran Fury, 'Public domain' (https://www.granfury.org/no-copyright: 'ALL ARTWORK BY GRAN FURY IS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN')
  15. Alexis Clements, 'We Were Not Making Art, We Were at War', Hyperallergic, 21 November 2012 (https://hyperallergic.com/60650/gran-fury-in-2012/: Helen Molesworth 'noted that Gran Fury often used the font Futura' and linked it to Barbara Kruger; the collective's use of advertising techniques)
  16. The Art Story, 'Gran Fury' (https://www.theartstory.org/artist/gran-fury/: the Guerrilla Girls, Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer listed as influences; The New York Crimes' subversion of mainstream codes traced to the Situationists and détournement; the Benetton look of Kissing Doesn't Kill; Read My Lips advertising the Sheridan Square kiss-in)
  17. Wikipedia: 'Barbara Kruger' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Kruger: found black-and-white photographs with declarative captions in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique) and 'Jenny Holzer' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Holzer: Truisms, 1977–79, anonymous broadsheets pasted around Manhattan, later on posters, T-shirts, stickers and LED signs)
  18. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Avram Finkelstein, 'Fact or Fiction', 1989, 2018.225 (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/786126: colour photo-offset lithograph printed in black and red, 21.6 × 34.3 cm) and 'Enjoy AZT', 1990, 2018.226 (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/786127: offset lithograph, 34.3 × 28.4 cm); collection images also show the Futura headline, serif body and script signature of AIDS: 1 in 61
  19. Avram Finkelstein, 'AIDS, Coca-Cola, and the Tompkins Square Park Riot', OnCurating 42, 'What You Don't Know About AIDS Could Fill a Museum' (https://on-curating.org/issue-42-reader/aids-coca-cola-and-the-tompkins-square-park-riot.html: Enjoy AZT made with Vincent Gagliostro as a street poster, silkscreen 1989; squatting on Coca-Cola's branding to show that a drug is marketed like any consumer product; its text on Burroughs Wellcome; the agitprop of ACT UP committees such as Majority Action, the Women's Committee and the Housing Committee outside the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives)
  20. NPR, '6 Little Words Helped Make George H.W. Bush (A 1-Term) President', 4 December 2018, as republished by WRVO (https://www.wrvo.org/2018-12-04/6-little-words-helped-make-george-h-w-bush-a-1-term-president: William Safire traced 'read my lips' to a 1957 song title, a 1978 Tim Curry album and sports clichés before Bush) and Wikipedia: 'Read my lips: no new taxes' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read_my_lips:_no_new_taxes: spoken at the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans on 18 August)

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