When AIDS first struck New York City in the 1980s, the crisis wasn’t met with an appropriate, organized campaign from the government. Health care specialists didn’t even know what caused the epidemic, and it wasn’t like the general public could google information or join Reddit discussions about HIV and AIDS. How did people share information and mobilize?
Answers are on display in the exhibition Love & Fury: New York’s Fight Against AIDS at Poster House in Manhattan.
Curated by HIV historian Ian Bradley-Perrin, PhD, the show collects posters, flyers, advertisements and similar items spanning 1979 to 2003. As Poster House explains:
“When AIDS hit New York, posters spoke where institutions stayed silent. In a city wired for visual competition—crowded streets, subway ads, nightclub flyers—posters became lifelines. They were how people found clinics, mourned the dead, demanded justice, and fought for the living.
“This exhibition explores how graphic design shaped New York’s grassroots response to AIDS from 1979 to 2003. Public health campaigns, agitprop, benefit flyers, and club handbills offer more than messages—they map how communities built survival systems from below, often before the state would act.
“These posters were not ornamental. They served as a communications infrastructure: maps to clinics, calls to protest, love letters, and warnings. They made an invisible epidemic visible, and they did more than express grief—they organized. As scholar Douglas Crimp has written in his book Melancholia and Moralism, AIDS demanded both “mourning and militancy.” These posters ask viewers to see the epidemic not only as a public health crisis but also as a fight over who is seen, who is heard, and who is allowed to live. While posters were a medium for reflecting an experience, they were also intended to affirm and secure life itself.”
You don’t have to travel to Poster House’s Chelsea location to enjoy these stunning visuals. Visit Poster House’s Facebook page and Instagram page for images and discussions.
What’s more the exhibit’s website offers a Timeline of Action & Loss that includes not just a history of the epidemic but also a collection of the show’s artworks. Each item includes a write-up offering history and context.
For example, below is one image along with five bullet points written to accompany the ACT UP poster:
“AIDS Crisis,” 1990, by ACT UP/GangCourtesy of Poster House Permanent Collection
- This poster takes aim at the contradiction between the traditional, macho American self-image and the reality of the AIDS crisis. By hijacking the Marlboro Man—a symbol of rugged individualism—the composition challenges the myth of national strength in the face of widespread government negligence. A layer of irony was added by the growing recognition of the public health threat posed by cigarettes, positioning President H. W. Bush as the public health threat in the context of AIDS.
- Released shortly after Bush’s first year in office (after he had served as vice president under Reagan), this poster voiced ACT UP’s frustration with a president who offered rhetorical support but no meaningful funding.
- In 1990, Bush signed the Ryan White CARE Act that provided federal funding for medical care, support services, and treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS, particularly those without insurance. The legislation marked a major shift in federal AIDS policy by prioritizing access to care for low-income and marginalized populations and it remains one of the largest sources of HIV/AIDS funding in the United States today. Despite this landmark legislation, Bush’s government approved only one-third of the requested budget for the program.
- Ryan White was a teenager from Indiana who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion. He became a national symbol of the epidemic after his expulsion from school drew widespread media attention. He died in 1990.
- Unlike federal campaigns such as America Responds to AIDS that focused on palatable slogans and broad appeal, this poster explains that AIDS is political and that its death toll is the result of conscious inaction. Posters like this one were produced by activist organizations that named the institutions and individuals they held responsible, used appropriation and irony to subvert dominant cultural symbols, and prioritized political clarity over consensus-building.
Folks able to visit the New York exhibit can also attend in-person events, including numerous tours as well as Community AIDS Memorial Quilt-Making Workshops on Saturday, April 25 and Sunday, April 26. Saturday, August 1, there will be a screening of What Wondrous Love is This, a documentary in which Brooklyn-based journalist and director Tim Chaffee explores the work of his mother, Barbara Chaffee, MD, a public health doctor in Binghamton, New York, who confronted the simultaneous epidemics of drug addiction, AIDS and HIV in the 1980s and ’90s and later faced her own personal struggle with cancer.
Love & Fury: New York’s Fight Against AIDS runs until September 6 at 119 W. 23rd St, New York City.
