Love & Fury: New York’s Fight Against AIDS at Poster House

Poster House, the first museum in the United States dedicated to the global history of posters, will present four new exhibitions for the spring 2026 season. The two main exhibitions, Act Black: Posters from Black American Stage & Screen and Love & Fury: New York’s Fight Against AIDS, will open to the public on March 13, 2026 and close on September 6, 2026.

Love & Fury explores how graphic design became a frontline tool in New York City’s grassroots response to the AIDS crisis from 1979 to 2003. As rare illnesses began appearing among young gay men in the late 1970s and early 1980s, communities recognized the danger long before public health authorities acted. Early stigma, exemplified by the term GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency), shaped public perception even as the death toll mounted.

In the absence of a meaningful state response, groups such as the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) formed, community bulletins circulated and posters became urgent instruments of care, education, mourning and even protest. In a city saturated with visual messages from subway ads to nightclub flyers, posters replaced institutional silence.

The exhibition brings together public health campaigns, agitprop, benefit flyers and club handbills to show how poster design helped build survival networks from the ground up. These recent artifacts map how information spread, how communities mobilized for each other and how graphic design functioned as an action all its own.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA).