Gran Fury: Art Is Not Enough

Gran Fury: Art Is Not Enough is the first large survey catalogue of the New York collective that made AIDS activist graphics between 1988 and 1995.

The book accompanies the group's presentation at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) and is edited by Adriano Pedrosa and André Mesquita. It runs to 216 pages with 156 color reproductions of posters, billboards, newspapers, stickers, photographs and videos, alongside pamphlets and other ephemera. Essays and interviews, some previously unpublished, come from Mesquita, David Deitcher, Douglas Crimp, Marcos Martins and Vinicius Franco, with texts by the collective itself.

Gran Fury grew out of ACT UP and worked in the visual language of advertising and public information to challenge government inaction and media accounts of HIV/AIDS. Its work overlaps with the Silence=Death Project, whose pink triangle poster became a symbol of the movement, and includes the 1988 Read My Lips image made for an ACT UP action.