Creating and Re-creating AIDS Activist Art: The Biography of the Gran Fury Poster: An Introduction to My Project

My MA student Karen Summerfeld is involved in some ground-breaking work on the design activist collective Gran Fury. She will be making her research and interviews available on a new blog:

Creating and Re-creating AIDS Activist Art: The Biography of the Gran Fury Poster: An Introduction to My Project:

The Power of Pink

In keeping with the groundbreaking feminist education program at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, in 1974 Sheila de Bretteville designed Pink, a meditation on color and feminine identity.  The poster responded to a call for submissions issued by the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), which was looking to grow a scholarship fund by asking one hundred of its members, an impressive array of artists, designers, and photographers, to interpret the word “color.” While many chose to exploit the prismatic variety of hue, saturation, and value, de Bretteville chose a single color.  Using thirty-six squares of pink paper, she solicited various women to shape, model and, to some minds, distort their reactions to this furtively fussy and feminine color. 

Times have changed, and pink’s new engagement with major league football is fascinating (if utterly different from the way the color was envisaged in de Bretteville’s poster or even James Jaxxa's 2004 Pink Football).  

The patches of color on cleats, jerseys, wristbands and fields are striking. So much for the color being feminine. Or is it? Pink has a history that transcends as a fighting color (as a variant of red).  But others say it’s about NFL promotion, and the creation of new, consciously feminized clothing that can now be sold with professional teams’ other paraphernalia profits the owners and not cancer research. 

It's hard not to see the spectacle today and not think back to Judy Chicago's Fresno Art Program's Cunt Cheerleaders c. 1971.

Eastern European posters

In my research, I've been struck by the aspirational quality of Eastern European posters.  For instance, the Czech New Wave film director Jiri Menzel  used Larks on a String (krivánci na niti) (1969) a movie set in grim postwar Czechoslavakia,  to critique Pollyannaish posters.  A political satire made during the Prague Spring, the film tells the story of  a labor camp  situated in a vast industrial dump.   Never is the gap between Marxist theory and practical reality  more clear than when a shy couple pose for a state-sponsored newsreel; party functionaries insist that they sit before a brightly colored poster depicting an idealized man and a woman . 

In Poland, Andrzej Wajda’s 1977 film Man of Marble  (Czlowiek z marmuru), explored the underside of socialist propaganda as well. In this case, the film-maker follows the rise and fall of Mateusz Birkut, a humble bricklayer who, in the late 1940s, is mythologized as a model worker. Using newsreel footage of crowded parades, cheerful martial songs, idealized statues (including a marble one mentioned in the film’s title) as well as over life size posters, director Wajda also critiques the official Soviet-style art and the scaffolding that propped it up.  Individuals are submerged behind idealized, constructed images.  The rickety structure girding this system is nowhere more clear than Birkut’s fall from favor, when he loses his state-sponsored apartment and witnesses the massive posters of himself pulled down.