Co-sponsored by Public Art Fund, New York, this multicity-wide installation of bus shelter posters by the collective Gran Fury set out to meet the group’s primary purpose: raising awareness about the AIDS crisis. Gran Fury was founded by eleven originally anonymous members of the activist organization, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), 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. The group formed out of the recognition that art could be a powerful tool in ending the AIDS crisis, whether through protest iconography, public awareness campaigns, or other forms of visual critique.
For this installation across one hundred bus shelters in New York and eighty in LA—the collective’s first project in LA—Gran Fury designed their now historic poster, Women Don't Get AIDS. Aiming to dispel the pernicious myth that AIDS only affected gay men, and to encourage clinical research on more diverse groups, the poster’s full headline reads, “Women Don’t Get AIDS … They Just Die From It.”
Gran Fury was organized by Ann Goldstein, Associate Curator,The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.