This text is a part of Hyperallergic’s 2025 Satisfaction Month collection, spotlighting moments from New York’s LGBTQ+ artwork historical past all through June.
The phrases “SILENCE = DEATH” in daring white textual content in opposition to a black background, printed below a pink triangle, have been what six New Yorkers had wheat-pasted between commercials for live shows, films, and clothes on the streets of Decrease Manhattan in early 1987. In just a few months, the enduring design would turn out to be synonymous with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Energy (ACT UP) — a civil disobedience group dedicated to ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic devastating communities throughout the USA all through the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s, particularly affecting queer, low-income, and non-White teams.
However earlier than the historic demonstrations on Wall Avenue and out of doors the Meals and Drug Administration (FDA) headquarters; the “die-ins” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral; and the mass spreading of ashes on the manicured garden of the White Home, the searing protest imagery of SILENCE = DEATH was simply crayon on pocket book leaflets, drafted over the course of 1986 throughout a string of Manhattan flats.
Silence = Demise posters wheat-pasted on a New York Metropolis avenue in February 1987 (picture by Oliver Johnston, courtesy Avram Finkelstein)
Tens of hundreds of individuals had already died from AIDS, but then-President Ronald Reagan had solely publicly talked about the lethal syndrome as soon as in response to a reporter’s query. The rising painful loss, authorities inaction, and societal apathy introduced Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás collectively as a consciousness-raising group.
“ We would meet every week at a different person’s apartment,” Finkelstein, who was additionally a founding member of ACT UP and the affiliated activist artwork collective Gran Fury, informed Hyperallergic. “We would all bring food, we were assigned dishes, an appetizer or dessert or the main course, and we started out talking about what it was like to be a gay man in the age of AIDS.”
“ We would start out talking about our personal fears and anxieties, but by the end, we would end up talking about some political story that was developing,” he added.
ACT UP Demonstration in NYC Federal Plaza on June 30, 1987. From left: Steve Gendon, Mark Aurigemma, Douglas Montgomery, Charles Stinson, Frank O’Dowd, Avram Finkelstein (© Donna Binder, picture by and courtesy the artist)
Searching for to mobilize individuals after infamous conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. proposed mandating an AIDS tattoo in a March 1986 New York Occasions editorial, they determined to make posters that spoke out in opposition to the blatant discrimination that was killing members of their group. For the signage, they determined to subvert the dehumanizing pink badges utilized by Nazis in focus camps to establish LGBTQ+ prisoners. In late February, the group posted the SILENCE=DEATH posters all through decrease Manhattan in neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, which was not solely traditionally a queer enclave, but in addition dwelling to main ebook publishers, artists, and different outstanding voices. “ We were trying to market a movement before the movement actually started,” Finkelstein mentioned.
Left: Sketches by Oliver Johnston on the Silence = Demise poster design made at Jorge Socarrás’s East Village residence, 1986Right: Avram Finkelstein’s notebooks from 1986 documenting sketches of the Silence = Demise collective’s historic poster and assembly notes (pictures courtesy Avram Finkelstein)
That motion to struggle again in opposition to the AIDS epidemic started taking form simply weeks in a while March 10, when Finkelstein and the group gathered with a crowd of some dozen others on the Lesbian and Homosexual Group Companies Middle. Activist Larry Kramer gave an pressing speech calling for motion. ACT UP was established two days later, and on the finish of the month, over 200 protesters took to Wall Avenue to demand extra entry to experimental AIDS remedy and authorities motion.
The SILENCE=DEATH iconography appeared at ACT UP’s second demonstration on Tax Day outdoors the New York Metropolis Common Publish Workplace, and the tagline caught. Later that yr, ACT UP included the imagery in its neon set up “Let the Record Show …” (1987) within the window of the New Museum (the work would later turn out to be a part of the museum’s everlasting assortment). Although this was not the one design factor that ACT UP utilized to push authorities officers and companies, pharmaceutical corporations, and the general public to enact change, it was definitely its most generally disseminated — by way of posters, public commercials, buttons, and T-shirts, and extra.
ACT UP Wall Avenue demonstration in 1988, one yr after the group’s first motion (© Clay Walker, picture by and courtesy the artist)
Gran Fury, the 11-member artist group born out of the SILENCE=DEATH collective and ACT UP, contributed quite a few putting protest artworks that decried unaffordable healthcare prices, federal insurance policies, homophobic public attitudes, and anti-safe-sex rhetoric. The group’s confrontational graphics, like ACT UP’s media-savvy public disruptions, typically imitated company advertising ploys and authorities propaganda that aimed to reshape public attitudes across the AIDS epidemic and, by extension, enact tangible change; grounded within the goal of mass distribution, Gran Fury’s artworks are at present within the public area.
“ It’s a way to leverage something made by a few people,” Croft informed Hyperallergic.
Vincent Gagliostro and Avram Finkelstein’s “Enjoy AZT (ACT UP) Your House Is Mine” (1989-91) was created for a “die-in” protest on the Nationwide Institutes of Well being (picture courtesy Avram Finkelstein)
These ways proceed to be employed by activist actions in the present day, from Occupy Wall Avenue to Black Lives Matter. The current Free Palestine protests in opposition to the US-backed Israeli assault on Gaza have typically repurposed many visuals affiliated with Gran Fury and ACT UP, like Writers Towards the Conflict on Gaza’s “New York (War) Crimes” custom-printed broadsheets and Jewish Voice for Peace’s transformation of the ACT UP pink triangle right into a watermelon slice.
“ It’s about emotional engagement and the stimulation of individuals,” Finkelstein informed Hyperallergic. “Movements are made of people, and people have to be stimulated.”
The group’s 1988 Wall Avenue demonstration on the intersection of Rector Avenue and Trinity Place (© Clay Walker, picture by and courtesy the artist)
Gran Fury, Let the Document Present. . . (1987) on the New Museum (picture by way of public area)
1987 ACT UP Civil Disobedience at Federal Courthouse in Manhattan (© Donna Binder, picture by and courtesy the artist)
