It Is Civil War

Conor Williams on the legacy and continued relevance of the activist art collective Gran Fury.

By Conor WilliamsJuly 18, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• Politics

“WHEN A GOVERNMENT turns its back on its people, is it civil war?” This is the question the activist art collective Gran Fury posed on New York City billboards in the late 1980s and early ’90s. At the time, the pointed indifference and inaction of the Reagan administration, combined with the grandstanding of the Catholic Church and the so-called Moral Majority, was seen by activists as tantamount to an attempted genocide of people with HIV/AIDS. Like Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz, Gran Fury, throughout these plague years, often intentionally blurred the lines between vandalism and public art. Inspired by the text-based work of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, the collective made pieces designed to grab New Yorkers’ attention.

An offshoot of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Gran Fury was formed in 1988, after Marlene McCarty, John Lindell, and Donald Moffett created a work to be exhibited in the window of the New Museum. The piece, Let the Record Show…, used imagery from the Nuremberg trials to compare the government’s neglect of people with AIDS to the horrors of the Nazis. Over the next seven years, members would come and go (filmmaker Todd Haynes was involved at one point), but a core of 11 members, including Tom Kalin, Avram Finkelstein, and Mark Simpson, guided a flurry of AIDS agitprop. As collective member Marlene McCarty recounts to author and historian Sarah Schulman in her 2021 ACT UP oral history, which takes its name from that initial piece,

Gran Fury never came together and said, We’re going to make art. They had an entirely different mission. Their goal was “in as raw and rambunctious a way as we could” to get out certain messages that they felt were not reaching the mainstream world, which is why they adopted the mainstream look of advertising.

The recent publication Gran Fury: Art Is Not Enough, edited by Adriano Pedrosa and André Mesquita, curators of a 2024 exhibition of the same name at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), offers a survey of the collective’s work and an in-depth examination of its legacy. An essay by Mesquita situates the group’s actions in historical context. “The history of the HIV/AIDS activism movement,” he writes, “is one of permanence, a tale of the necessity for powerful images and marginalized groups born out of micropolitical, anti-authoritarian, and community actions that gradually gained momentum, support, exposure, discussion, space, and influence in the public sphere.” Mesquita situates ACT UP protests in an international context of contemporaneous social movements, such as Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina memorializing the victims of Jorge Rafael Videla’s fascist regime and calling for the perpetrators to be held to account. For example, he compares ACT UP’s iconic 1988 “die-in” at the FDA headquarters in Maryland with the Madres’ Siluetazo, an action that also made outlines of the dead, in this case Argentina’s 30,000 disappeared.

Around my Brooklyn neighborhood, thanks to the dedication of a small printmaking shop, one can still spot flyers attributed to Gran Fury that read, in bold font: “MEN / USE CONDOMS / OR BEAT IT.” It’s not surprising that Gran Fury’s messaging has found its way back onto the walls and windows of New York City. The pain and confusion of the COVID-19 pandemic is still felt today, and with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ghoulish contempt for scientific fact, we’ve seen diseases like measles spread across the country once more. The Trump administration recently eliminated funding for dozens of grants related to HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment at the NIH and CDC. These attacks on healthcare and medical aid have imperiled at-risk communities not just in the United States but across the globe as well. An April report from Nature paints a dire picture: “If global health funding is not restored, researchers estimate that by 2030, there could be as many as 11 million extra HIV infections and 3 million extra deaths due to AIDS.” During a May hearing on Capitol Hill, RFK Jr. leapt from his chair in fright when protesters stormed the room and chanted “RFK kills people with AIDS!”

In Gran Fury’s final year, 1995, they published an essay, “Good Luck … Miss You,” which is republished in the book. In the essay, they reflect on how the context of their art, as well as the fight against AIDS, has changed over the years since the group’s founding. “Many of our strategies were incorporated into advertising,” they write. “An ad campaign, however provocative, still has its AIDS message subservient to promoting a company name.” Thirty years later, the aesthetic landscape of New York City has become entirely dominated by advertisements. Every facet of human existence has been monetized and sold back to us to such an extent that it would make the ghost of Jean Baudrillard weep. The other day, on the subway, I looked up at a banner that brushed away its presumably young, female demographic’s notions of needing a hair and makeup team in order to look like a star in their online photos. The ad suggested that the modern beauty standard is not to be reached by applying makeup to one’s face but rather through digital filters that simulate freckles and blush.

Corporate-funded images and videos have supplanted graffiti, or Gran Fury’s preferred method of illegal wheatpasting, but it’s never too late to go back to the old ways of doing things. What’s great about Art Is Not Enough is that it is mainly a visual compendium of Gran Fury’s work, and therefore a reminder that, while our field of vision is dominated by the interests of capital, there is still much we can do to reclaim this territory. Gran Fury’s 1988 “civil war” piece sat alongside cigarette ads in subway stations. Its bottom text read: “The U.S. Government considers the 47,524 dead from AIDS expendable. Aren’t the ‘right’ people dying? Is this medical apartheid?” Another famous 1988 poster showed a bloody handprint, and stated in bold black font, “THE GOVERNMENT HAS / BLOOD ON ITS HANDS / ONE AIDS DEATH / EVERY HALF HOUR.” The group would leave their bloody prints on city walls and mailboxes.

In 1989, Gran Fury published The New York Crimes, their take on the paper of record. “N.Y. HOSPITALS IN RUINS; CITY HALL TO BLAME,” read a headline in the Times font, with the subheading “KOCH FUCKS UP AGAIN.” A photo showed Mayor Ed Koch grimly inspecting a broken window. This image literalized the so-called “broken windows theory” by which Koch governed: heavily police small crimes so as to deter bigger crimes. Gran Fury’s caption: “Mayor Koch examines the ruins of New York City after years of his neglect. Critics blame the demise of the hospital system and the lack of AIDS services on his administration.”

Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), founded in the aftermath of the firing of Artforum editor-in-chief David Velasco in 2023, has taken up the work of Gran Fury, refusing to stay silent in the face of a genocide. In November 2023, the group began putting out The New York (War) Crimes, a bimonthly protest publication condemning the complicity of The New York Times under the motto “all the consent that’s fit to manufacture.” This resurrection of the situationist tactic of détournement, or hijacking found material to give it a new meaning, by Gran Fury and WAWOG is premised on the idea that if those trusted with communicating truth won’t tell the truth, then we can make them tell the truth.

In October 2024, the post-rock group Godspeed You! Black Emperor released their latest album. In a move rather reminiscent of Gran Fury, it was titled NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD. By now, over 55,000 people have been killed in Gaza. In 1988, Gran Fury was invited to create a poster for a series taking place at the Kitchen, a performance space venue in Manhattan. In bold white font, it read: “WITH 42,000 DEAD / ART / IS NOT ENOUGH / TAKE / COLLECTIVE / DIRECT / ACTION / TO END / THE AIDS / CRISIS.”

In 1989, Gran Fury repeated this idea with a poster for an exhibition catalog for AIDS: The Artists’ Response, an exhibit at The Ohio State University. This one began, “WITH 47,524 DEAD, ART IS NOT ENOUGH.” From a group that had directly called out the White House, the mayor of New York, and the Pope, this exhortation that “art is not enough” was weirdly one of their most controversial and challenging statements. In a 1992 conversation with author and curator David Deitcher, Mark Simpson said:

The people we were targeting with that information were artists and their audience. We were saying, “Art is not enough; do something more.” When we did it, we were thinking, art is not enough; fundraising is not enough; memorials are not enough. You know, it was a call to people to get off their asses and do something more.

Tom Kalin added, “One of the things I liked about the piece was the fact that we implicate ourselves when we say it. After all, we’re using art to say that art is not enough.” In the 1980s and ’90s, art was not enough to stop the devastation of a generation by HIV/AIDS. In our time, not only is art not enough, but art institutions have also completely cowered in the face of their responsibilities.

Perhaps another reason Gran Fury’s work is resonating so strongly today is that, amid the country’s malaise, a sense of digital fatigue is spreading. We’ve been bombarded enough by algorithmically induced garbage. If the algorithm prefers to stunt the outreach of “political” content, isn’t that censorship? When someone puts something up on the walls of the city—on the front of a building, or in the subways—sometimes it gets taken down or scrubbed over. But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it stays there. A screen is reprogrammed more often than graffiti gets painted over. Wheatpasted ads may stay up until they’re bleached away by the sun or picked at by passersby.

Gran Fury: Art Is Not Enough contains many lessons for aspiring anti-fascists, artists, and others. The truth of the matter is that the government has turned its back on the people. It is civil war. In July 2024, Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation head and contributor to Trump’s Project 2025 playbook, said that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Recently, at a town hall with Iowa senator Joni Ernst addressing proposed cuts to Medicaid, an audience member cried out, “People will die!” Ernst’s response? “Well, we all are going to die.” What Art Is Not Enough tells us is that, while the current regime may want us to lose this civil war, people have the power to break through the complacency of everyday life. This process can start with artmaking, but it can’t end there. We must stand up and start fighting. As Donald Moffett put it in an interview with art historian Douglas Crimp, “We didn’t come out of nowhere. We dragged the history of this kind of art into the ’80s and the early ’90s. And it will be reinvented again.”