Resistance and Pride in Design

Our Government Continues to Ignore the Lives, Death, and Suffering of People with HIV Infection [poster], circa late 1980s

This is art in Cobb County [t-shirt], circa 1990s

ACT UP protest poster using red text in place of stripes on the American flag. The poster, printed in the late 80s, cites that by July 4, 1989, over 55,000 people would have died due to AIDS. According to amFAR, 89,343 Americans died from AIDS between 1981-1989.
Courtesy of Georgia State University. Special Collections, Andrew Wood papers.
After Cobb County residents complained about a performance of Terrence McNally's play Lips Together, Teeth Apart, the Cobb County Commission issued an anti-gay resolution and cut arts funding. This t-shirt created by the TABOO collective protests censorship in Cobb County, stating that "If it weren't for gay people, American culture would be the equivalent of 'Let's Make a Deal.'"
Courtesy of Georgia State University. Special Collections, Carole Brown papers.
A protest t-shirt design also printed on badges applies the word "fuck" to surrounding words in both a sexual sense ('boys," "girls," "with latex," "passionately," "safe") and a dismissive one ("silence," "government inaction," "AIDS misinformation," "passivity," "pharmaceutical profiteering," "corporate greed," "intolerance," "health-budget cuts").
Courtesy of Georgia State University. Special Collections, LGBTQ Institute's Jim Allen papers.
A 1989 Spanish t-shirt rendition of the iconic Silence=Death Project design and ACT UP slogan.
Courtesy of Georgia State University. Special Collections, LGBTQ Institute's Jim Allen papers.

Part of the visual response to the AIDS crisis and homophobia in the 1980s and 1990s was the designing of posters and t-shirts to distribute messaging. ACT UP/Atlanta, established in 1988 after the organization’s founding in New York, began its first months of targeted activism with banners on overpasses and railroad bridges calling attention to Circle K’s discriminatory health insurance policy, which denied employee insurance claims for illnesses like AIDS that the company deemed the result of “personal lifestyle decisions.” The group also staged events like die-ins in front of the State Capitol and the Centers for Disease Control. The Silence=Death Project’s iconic poster design—featuring the pink triangle associated with Nazi Germany’s persecution of gay men—was integrated into ACT UP after the poster’s six designers joined the group. The pictographic icon was chosen as an inclusionary symbol with multiple “open-ended” codes, “signifying lesbian and gay identity to some audience members, maleness to others, and referencing the historical meanings of genocide.” The NAMES Project’s AIDS Memorial Quilt, born in San Francisco in 1985 and residing in Atlanta from 2001 to 2020 likewise became iconic as a form of mass public mourning and remembrance. The quilt now contains more than 48,000 panels dedicated to more than 100,000 individuals lost to AIDS. Recognizing the importance of graphic design to political expression and public attention throughout the AIDS crisis, the Museum of Design Atlanta hosted the exhibit “Graphic Intervention: 25 Years of International AIDS Awareness Posters” in 2011.

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