Curated by Gran Fury and Michael Cohen

In 1993, the AIDS-activist art collective Gran Fury produced a modest poster that asked four simple questions––among them, DO YOU TRUST HIV-NEGATIVES? and WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CRIED? It was a despairing time: ACT UP? was in disarray, no treatment breakthroughs were on the horizon, friends were dying. Two years later, the development of protease inhibitors changed everything for many of us, with the result that the present generation is mostly ignorant of that terrible time. Now Gran Fury has reunited to mount a comprehensive survey of the works that, starting in 1988, were the public face of ACT UP––especially in the art world. (A piece called Control was made for the pages of Artforum in 1989, The Pope and the Penis for the 1990 Venice Biennale.) The 80WSE exhibition includes reprinted posters and contextual material, and its eighty-seven-page catalogue will include a reprint of my own interview with the collective together with other conversations and writings by the artists themselves.

— Douglas Crimp