It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic - Paperback

by Jack Lowery (Author)

An "unsparing account" (NPR) of art collective Gran Fury, which fought back during the AIDS crisis through direct action and community-made propaganda

In the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was annihilating queer people, intravenous drug users, and communities of color in America, and disinformation about the disease ran rampant. Out of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an art collective that called itself Gran Fury formed to campaign against corporate greed, government inaction, stigma, and public indifference to the epidemic.

Writer Jack Lowery examines Gran Fury's art and activism from iconic images like the "Kissing Doesn't Kill" poster to the act of dropping piles of fake bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Lowery offers a complex, moving portrait of a collective and its members, who built essential solidarities with each other and whose lives evidenced the profound trauma of enduring the AIDS crisis.

Author Biography

Jack Lowery is a writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, BOMB, Art in America, LitHub, the Times Literary Supplement, and The Awl. He has taught in both the Undergraduate Writing Program (UWP) and the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University. As an editor, he has published the poetry of David Wojnarowicz.