Kissing Doesn’t Kill and other projects Favorite 

Gran Fury was an AIDS activist artist collective from New York City consisting of 11 members, all artists - but action, not art, was the aim of the collective. Gran Fury member Loring McAlpin described the collective's mass-market ambition to “...fight for attention as hard as Coca-Cola fights for attention.”

Gran Fury's work dramatically helped raise the visibility of ACT-UP. The art collective's focus on political effectiveness over any other considerations is what made their projects work — along, of course, with their brilliance and talent. ACT-UP did plenty of other very creative things, but Gran Fury's graphical contributions were invaluable.

Among their many projects, they swapped copies of The New York Times in coin-operated dispensers with their own The New York Crimes which resembled “...The New York Times but was full of information relating to the AIDS crisis.”

Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do was a political art action that manipulated advertising and media strategies in order to reach a broad audience with information about AIDS and its complex issues.

The first stage of the project was a mass mailing of a postcard-sized image of young men and women of different sexual and racial orientations kissing; it was accompanied by the text, “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.” The back of the card read “Corporate greed, government inaction and public indifference make AIDS a political crisis.” The image was intentionally designed to resemble a well known clothing industry ad campaign.