Art Is Not Enough. Poster for the exhibition catalog AIDS: The Artists’ Response, at the Ohio State University, 1989. Offset print on paper. From Gran Fury: Art Is Not Enough, published by MASP/KMEC Books.
From 1988–1995, Gran Fury unleashed a public art campaign against the power brokers that allowed AIDS to ravage the nation. The New York–based activist artist collective, which emerged at the start of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), adopted a DIY grassroots ethos to change the ways people thought about the deadly pandemic that was being used by Christofascists to destroy the LGBTQ community just two decades after Stonewall.
From the outset, Gran Fury acknowledged reality for what it was. In a 1988 poster designed for The Kitchen, an independent experimental art and performance space in New York, Gran Fury decried, “With 42,000 Dead, Art Is Not Enough. Take Collective Direct Action to End the AIDS Crisis.”
It was a call to arms among comrades to step up and stand shoulder to shoulder against a government that would sooner see you dead from a virus that is only now, nearly 40 years later, finally under control. But what is this now in 2025, when SARS Cov-2 — a new virus whose central feature is also T cell death — has resulted in more than 30 million dead and 5% of the global population (400 million) disabled in just five years?
As today the Donald Trump regime fast tracks the collapse of the United States’ social foundations starting with the destruction of the National Institute of Health and the Center of Disease Control, the nation once again aligns itself with the open embrace of fascism. Perhaps what is needed now more than ever is a roadmap to resistance.
Let the record show
Enter Gran Fury: Art Is Not Enough, a visual history of the legendary collective that used propaganda to speak truth to power to a government that used the AIDS pandemic to enact the latest chapter of a longstanding eugenics campaign against Black, Latine, queer, disabled, and unhoused communities.
In 1987, with the understanding that art is an action, rather than an object, members of ACT UP understood the medium is the message. Tapping into the language of advertising and graphic design, they crafted campaigns that could be deployed across street art, protest art, and public art, their endless multiplicity only increasingly its power.
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