AIDS art and activism in the 1980s: the very cases of Keith Haring and Gran Fury
AIDS art and activism in the 1980s: the very cases of Keith Haring and Gran Fury

Summary/Abstract: In the 1980s USA, the emergence of individual artists and art collectives, which managed to break the racist and homophobic shell of queer art through the pioneering visual language they created in order to fight the monster of AIDS, both during that period and later, constituted a bright sunray in the deep darkness of political prejudice and social ignorance. Two of the most important representatives of this social activist art, directly associated with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the American LGBTQ community, were the visual artist Keith Haring and the art/activist collective Gran Fury. This paper aims to research the subversive works of these two American LGBTQ art community ‘entities’, focusing not only on their artistic and social backgrounds, but also on the techniques they employed to create their effective visual language. Moreover, this study aims to comment on the artistic messages sent not just to the conservative American society, but also to the rest of the world in order to raise awareness about the devastating AIDS crisis.

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