Gran Fury

June-December, 1989
Citywide
Photo © 1989 Aldo Hernandez

Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do was a political art action that manipulated advertising and media strategies to reach a broad audience with information about AIDS and the issues surrounding it. The first stage of the project was a mass mailing of a postcard-sized image of hip young men and women of different sexual and racial orientations kissing accompanied by the text “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.” The back of the card read “Corporate greed, government inaction and public indifference make AIDS a political crisis.” The image was intentionally designed to look much like a well known clothing industry ad campaign.

The second part of the project was the production of the same image as a 12 x 3 foot color poster displayed on dozens of New York City buses. The poster was also featured prominently in the Whitney Museum exhibition Media World and has also been displayed on buses in San Francisco and Chicago as part of Art Against AIDS: On the Road.

Gran Fury was a collective of AIDS activists and artists working from 1988 to 1994 in a position of retaliation against government and social institutions that make those living with AIDS invisible. They sought to inform a broad public of these issues and provoke direct action to end the AIDS crisis. Gran Fury’s work manipulated sophisticated advertising strategies to render complex socioeconomic and political issues understandable, thereby reaching an audience not often addressed by government and media propaganda.