Gran Fury
1990, Bus Side Poster
On loan from Ohio Lesbian Archives, gifted to OLA by Sara Vance Waddell.
This poster was found in a dumpster in Chicago in 1990.
It was designed by Gran Fury, a political art collective arm of ACT-UP that used the visual language of advertising to fight AIDS. It was commissioned by the American Foundation for AIDS Research for “Art Against AIDS on the Road,” a public exhibition that ran in 1990 in San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC, and New York. AmFAR asked Gran Fury to remove “Corporate Greed, Government Inaction, and Public Indifference Make AIDS a Political Crisis” from the original design to avoid alienating corporate donors.
Even without that statement, same-sex couples kissing on public artwork was a powerful image at a time when the myth that saliva could transmit HIV was rampant.
Although Chicago politicians failed to ban the ads, within two days of the posters going up on Chicago Transit Authority, nearly all of them had been defaced or torn down.