Arts, Crafts, and the AIDS Crisis

Kate Snashall, Australian National University

On July 2^nd, 1981, The Bay Area Reporter, a weekly newspaper in San Francisco, published its first mention of ‘Gay Men’s Pneumonia.’ By the end of the same year, 130 people had already died from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, now known as AIDS.¹ Today, more than 40 million have died from AIDS, and 0.7% of the world’s population still lives with the disease.² However, AIDS was, and still is, more than just a public health issue. 

Instead, AIDS was an inherently cultural disease, targeting vulnerable social groups already experiencing social and political repression, making it an immediate subject of immense cultural discourse. Now, we remember the AIDS crisis visually through the cartoonish optimism of Keith Haring murals or David Wojnarowicz’s confronting photography. However, the visual impact of the AIDS crisis occurred not only in ‘fine arts.’ Rather, all aspects of material and visual culture were employed by stakeholders. This essay seeks to explore the use of craft and design for political purposes through analyzing two distinct artistic approaches to resolving the AIDS crisis. Firstly, the use of graphic design and deterrent imagery by well-intentioned — albeit harshly conservative — governments will be explored. The latter half of the essay is concerned with the use of textile practices to implement grassroots change. Through these two visual campaigns by different stakeholders, the impact and ability of the visual image and crafted object will be showcased as tools of political mobility, public healing, and social change. 

Early Days: Graphic Design and Deterrent Imagery in Service of Government Policy

In 1986, Australian Federal Health Minister, Neal Blewett, established the Health Department’s AIDS coordinating unit after 5000 HIV diagnoses occurred in Australia in the prior year.³ By this time, health officials had come to understand that transmission of AIDS occurred through unprotected sex with an infected individual or coming into contact with infected blood or blood products. Such transmission differentiated AIDS from other indiscriminate epidemics; instead, this disease waged a war against gay men, sex workers, and injecting drug users. As a result, AIDS was seen particularly in the U.S. as the by-product of deviant lifestyles as “God’s vengeance on homosexuality.”⁴ Given this social discourse, Blewett knew that health measures focused upon quarantine and sanctions would merely discourage people from testing and alienate those already infected, so he instead opted for an alternate route: preventative marketing.⁵

Blewett’s objectives for his marketing campaign were twofold: (1) to drive home the danger that AIDS represented, and (2) to encourage community-based support for research and preventative measures to hopefully bring about long-term funding commitments from the government and alternate organizations.⁶ This resulted in a $3 million campaign, consisting of leaflets, posters, and a 60-second television advertisement featuring the Grim Reaper, often bowling towards everyday Australians poised as passive bowling pins (fig. 1).

This campaign elicited immediate responses, with many claiming it was too violent for national broadcast, others arguing that it sensationalized the illness, and some celebrating its emotive power and visual impact.⁷ Ultimately, the campaign was cut short due to excessive public scrutiny, though it has subsequently lived on in Australia’s collective conscience as a dark reminder of the AIDS crisis and its ravaging impacts on society. However controversial, these fearsome design tactics were scarcely unique to Blewett’s department nor Australia; instead, governments around the world adopted their own preventative marketing campaigns, most similarly capitalizing on the innate human fear of death. 

In the UK, the Thatcher government began the ‘AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance’ campaign in 1986, creating advertisements and distributing brochures to every household, featuring morbid imagery including tombstones, icebergs, and coffins in a monochromatic palette.⁸ Similarly, US state health departments produced frightening posters, with the aim of condemning risky behavior and encouraging action through fear. One such example is the infamous ‘A Bad Reputation Isn’t All You Can Get From Sleeping Around’ poster design by Dallas County Health Department (fig. 2).⁹ In this design, the graphics are sparse: focused on bold typefaces and a singular, monochromatic image featuring a headstone in a graveyard. This morbid image dominates the poster and instantly creates an inevitable connotation of death, and its associated abjection and horror. Hence, all three campaigns employed similar graphic design features, from overtly horrifying imagery to subtly influential typography and spacing choices, to create marketing campaigns which utilized fearmongering to incentivise prevention and slow the rapid growth of the epidemic.  

These campaigns sought to elicit communal action through emotional impact, seen best in the use of morbid symbolism, such as the Grim Reaper, drawing on medieval connotations,¹⁰ or the tombstone, likening AIDS to a death sentence. Such iconography created strong emotional responses which led to increased attention and higher recall levels among audiences, thus forcing the general public to acknowledge the imminent and deadly risk posed by AIDS.¹¹ This imagery was compounded with monochromatic color palettes that created a pessimistic impression of AIDS and stark chiaroscuro, drawing attention to shocking slogans and symbolism.¹² Furthermore, the campaigns extended these visual threats to all groups of society, not merely LGBT communities and or drug-users. Such inclusivity is seen through the UK and US campaigns, which lack reference to the specific victims of AIDS, while the Australian campaign specifically included all members of society to ensure that this message was not confined to few but instead, broadcast to the masses.

This careful representation of victims of AIDS also facilitated another political objective of these three governments: to appease conservative groups in society and politics. In 1987, US Congress passed legislation which banned the use of federal funds for AIDS prevention and education campaigns that “promoted or encouraged, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities.”¹³ This unabashedly homophobic and strictly conservative law directly informed the nature of AIDS campaigns, and is indicative of the social pressures upon governments during the AIDS epidemic, which came at a time of vast social change and liberation. Hence, the decision to focus on abstract imagery was intrinsically linked to the political ideologies of governments and the social messages which they wished to communicate about the groups which the AIDS crisis most affected. Furthermore, the public nature of these campaigns, broadcast on television and plastered onto subway station walls, enabled governments to inject this necessary public messaging into society, surpassing geographic, ethnic, and often even linguistic, barriers. They employed the tactics of cultural activism of reappropriating the public sphere as a means of contesting and destabilising broadly accepted social hegemonies of power, culture, and in this case, public health.¹⁴

Despite the many successful outcomes of these marketing campaigns, their reliance on pessimistic deterrent imagery led to damaging consequences for vulnerable communities and people living with AIDS (PWA). Notably, despite the good intentions of abstract symbolism, this design choice isolated and alienated PWA. Vulnerable communities were either vilified as Grim Reaper characters or silenced, denying PWA of visibility, marking their diagnosis as a death sentence. When discussing the Australian campaign, writer and longtime AIDS activist David Menadue, diagnosed with AIDS in 1984, said: “…at the time, it was incredibly scary… we felt we were the Grim Reaper bowling the balls and that poor little girl in the pigtails, in many ways, was not the real target of the campaign.”¹⁵ 

Failures to directly address communities in favor of appeasing conservative values diverted money and attention away from those who needed it most, especially when coupled with homophobic legislation and social stigma. Another common design choice, prioritizing imagery and emotion over health information, further hindered the initial objectives of these campaigns. As seen in the lack of text in the Australian campaign poster, or the paragraph buried indistinctly at the bottom of the Dallas County poster, most campaigns simply urged readers to ‘get the facts’ without providing substantive information or adequate resources.¹⁶ Hence, many of these posters were criticised for spreading unnecessary hysteria and misinformation surrounding the already controversial epidemic. While greatly criticised, these three campaigns stand as testament to the power of graphic design and symbolism as tools to change public perception and encourage action. The design features they utilized, such as the choice of media or the representation of victims, were the product of unique balances between conservative political ideologies and efforts to mitigate a cultural and public health crisis with a rapidly rising death toll.

Commemorating AIDS and Creating Community through Textile Craft

By the late 1980s, vulnerable communities around the world were furious at governments for their lack of progress in addressing and resolving the epidemic, forcing grassroots activism to take centre stage in the fight against AIDS. Similar to their government counterparts, activists knew that visual and material culture would be one of the most effective tools to create the change they demanded. Hence, activist artist groups such as Gran Fury and Imagevirus were established to create protest art and harness visual culture to end the AIDS crisis.¹⁷ The resulting creative output was markedly diverse, encompassing the varying impacts of AIDS, unlike the grim uniformity of government prevention posters. 

One of the most influential works of activism through craft, a phenomenon now known as craftivism, came in the form of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, made by Cleve Jones of the NAMES Project. Jones was inspired to create the Quilt during a 1985 San Francisco AIDS protest, later stating that “if there were a field of a thousand corpses, people would be compelled to act… [he] wanted to create evidence [of AIDS deaths] and by extension create evidence of government failure.”¹⁸ In order to realise this need for drastic change, Jones carefully employed one of America’s most nostalgic tokens of material culture: the humble quilt.

The Quilt (fig. 3) consists of cloth panels, each measuring three  by six feet, the size of an average grave plot, and commemorating one or more AIDS victims,  sewn together to create a woven graveyard.¹⁹ To this day, the Quilt continues to grow, with over 105,000 names memorialized.²⁰ While the Quilt has been successful for many reasons, Jones’ use of a traditional textile craft was highly deliberate, and has subsequently proved immensely effective in  how it spoke to a nation and uplifted an otherwise repressed community.

Throughout history, quilting has played a critical role in American collective memory, from the freedom quilts of the Underground Railroad to the patriotic mythology of Betsy Ross. While textile crafts lessened in popularity due to early twentieth century industrialization, by the 1970s conservative nostalgia brought a new interest in American traditions of domesticity.²¹ Through this quintessential American folk craft, the Quilt recaptured traditional American values and ‘Reaganite’ idealizations of rural, nostalgic America and associated these with gay sexuality.²² Through this association, the Quilt presented a textile argument for AIDS as an issue of national concern, realizing The Names Project’s argument that Americans do not have AIDS, instead ‘America has AIDS.’²³

Moreover, quilts carry meaning in their purpose: to warm and comfort one another. Jones emphasised the inherent familial connotations of quilts as a symbolic item passed through generations, to craft a new community.²⁴ The Quilt creates a family for those impacted by AIDS, who were refused support from their government and often shunned by their own families, and extends support to those grieving their loved ones. The Quilt facilitated memorialisation for a community whose grief was denied validity in traditional forms of mourning. Despite growing trends in public commemoration in the late twentieth century, the Quilt’s use of individual expressive craft was unique for highlighting the stories of an epidemic, otherwise defined by statistics and stereotypes.²⁵ The personal memorabilia included on each panel are unique snapshots into the souls of those lost to AIDS,²⁶ and when demonstrated on such a monumental scale, viewers are confronted with the sheer impact of the epidemic, not in numbers but instead in lives (fig. 4). Public displays of the quilt in locations of national and political significance, such as outside the White House in 1988, highlighted this vast scale, and intrinsically linked the individual suffering of individuals with a collective demand for tangible political change.²⁷ 

The use of craft was not only symbolic in the meaning created by the displayed panels of the Quilt. Indeed, the very act of creating the Quilt established a mode of collective healing for the survivors of the epidemic. Craft practices, typically collaborative processes, involve the physical connecting of materials, and thus facilitates connection between concepts, people, and ideologies.²⁸ Hence, the use of craft was apt for a public health crisis which forced physical and cultural distance between people, as seen in the use of community craft practices to address the impacts of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. Government corruption, lack of education, and cultural taboos limited awareness of AIDS, allowing the disease to wreak havoc in rural and regional communities. Hence, community craft projects provided opportunities to raise awareness, enable self-expression, and improve the livelihoods of those affected. The Siyazama Project in KwaZulu-Natal, a regional community in South Africa, was initially established in 1995 to enable women to create beaded items that could be sold to international tourist markets and increase household income (fig. 5).²⁹

However, by 1998, it was evident to the creators that they ought to address the burgeoning problem of AIDS by raising awareness through their workshops and encouraging the women to express their experiences with the epidemic through their creative works.³⁰ Similarly, the Keiskamma Art Project, in the South African village of Hamburg, was founded in 2000 to collaboratively produce large-scale needlework recreations of Western art objects. Both projects harnessed the profound social impact of crafting practice to benefit both local and global communities and create effective change in the cultural implications of the AIDS crisis in South Africa. 

In Zulu culture, beadwork is traditionally significant as a non-verbal means of communicating social status and identity, or to communicate between lovers.³¹ Hence, participating women utilized skills learnt from their mothers and grandmothers to create wholly new messages regarding sexuality, gender, and AIDS.³² This convergence of tradition and modernity transcended cultural taboos and allowed the AIDS epidemic to be better understood within these communities. The resulting objects of the Siyazama Project are greatly varied, ranging from didactic portrayals of condoms and sexuality to highly idiosyncratic iconography, understood by only the maker. These women were motivated to produce without the pressure of addressing the masses, thus facilitating their own process of self-expression, understanding, and healing. However, these practices are not solitary, and instead are carried out in groups with other women, creating a sense of belonging, while providing an opportunity for reliable information to be shared throughout the communities.³³ Further harnessing the collective power of craft, the grand works of the Keiskamma Art Project exist as vast political monuments, demanding attention and drawing awareness to the unique impacts of the epidemic on women in these overshadowed communities.³⁴

These two crafting projects, alongside the AIDS Memorial Quilt, challenge the notion that crafts are ‘apolitical commodified activities carried out in the isolated, privatized domestic sphere.’³⁵ While the Quilt is starkly different to both the Siyazama and Keiskamma projects in scale and purpose, all three initiatives highlight the transformative nature of craft when applied to a broader cause. Instead of adhering to traditional reservations about textile as women’s work or craft as a solely domestic activity, these projects saw textile crafts as integral to building communities and uplifting them in their struggle against the devastating impacts of the AIDS crisis. 

The global AIDS crisis of the late twentieth century played out in a distinctly visual field, spanning from the advertisements seen on television to embroidered figurines sold in cultural markets. This remarkable intersection of craft, design, political activism, and public health highlights the unwavering abilities of material and visual culture to galvanise public awareness and drive social change. Government campaigns harnessed the emotional impacts of deterrent imagery, while grassroots campaigns employed affirmative messaging through self-expression and commemoration. Preventative marketing utilized imagery and graphic design as a tool of manipulation and messaging while artist activists employed the act and practice of crafting and creating to draw together and uplift communities. However, despite these stark differences, both approaches to the AIDS crisis explored in this analysis ultimately spoke to the power of design and craft as one of the greatest tools that humanity has access to, unbounded by financial, geographic, or social limitations. The creative legacy of the AIDS crisis will persist as a continuing reminder of the fragility of human life and the deeply powerful impact of visual culture in both furthering and fighting cultural prejudices.

Endnotes

1. “Timeline of The HIV and AIDS Epidemic,” HIV.gov, accessed May 17, 2024, https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline. ↩︎
2. “HIV,” World Health Organisation, accessed May 17, 2024, https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/hiv-aids. ↩︎
3. “The AIDS Grim Reaper Campaign (A),” The Australia and New Zealand School of Government, 2006. ↩︎
4. David J Baggett, “AIDS and the Wrath of God,” SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations, no. 157 (1994). ↩︎
5. “The AIDS Grim Reaper Campaign (A).” ↩︎
6. “The AIDS Grim Reaper Campaign (A).” ↩︎
7. “36 Years on, We Reflect on the Grim Reaper AIDS Ad,” Ending HIV, April 5, 2023, https://endinghiv.org.au/blog/36-years-on-we-reflect-on-the-grim-reaper-aids-ad/. ↩︎
8. Adam Burgess, “The Development of Risk Politics in the UK: Thatcher’s ‘Remarkable’ but Forgotten ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ AIDS Campaign,” Health, Risk, & Society 19, no. 5. (2017): 238. ↩︎
9. “Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics and Culture,” accessed May 21, 2024, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/surviving-and-thriving/digitalgallery_theme_4.html. ↩︎
10. Viva Gallego, “Image, Myth and Metaphor in the AIDS Epidemic,” The Australian Quarterly 60, no. 1 (1988): 89. ↩︎
11. Roger Bennett, “Effects of Horrific Fear Appeals on Public Attitudes Towards AIDS,” International Journal of Advertising 15, no. 3 (January 1, 1996): 196, https://doi.org/10.1080/02650487.1996.11104651. ↩︎
12. Natasha Geiling, “The Confusing and At-Times Counterproductive 1980s Response to the AIDS Epidemic,” Smithsonian Magazine, accessed May 7, 2024, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-confusing-and-at-times-counterproductive-1980s-response-to-the-aids-epidemic-180948611/. ↩︎
13. Geiling. ↩︎
14. Joshua Decter, “Infect the Public Domain with an Imagevirus: General Idea’s AIDS Project,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 15 (2007): 97. ↩︎
15. Interview with David Menadue, George Negus Tonight ABC, 2 March, 2004. ↩︎
16. “Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics and Culture.” ↩︎
17. Robert Sember and David Gere, “‘Let the Record Show . . .’: Art Activism and the AIDS Epidemic,” American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 6 (June 2006): 967, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2006.089219. ↩︎
18. Cleve Jones, interview by Christopher Capozzola, Cambridge, MA, December 5, 1993; Jones with Jeff Dawson, Stitching a Revolution: The Making of an Activist (San Francisco: Harper, 2000), 105. ↩︎
19. Jennifer Power, “Rites of Belonging: The AIDS Memorial Quilt,” in Movement, Knowledge, Emotion, Gay Activism and HIV/AIDS in Australia (ANU Press, 2011), 149, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt24hd2p.9. ↩︎
20. “History,” AIDS Memorial, accessed May 22, 2024, https:/ /www.aidsmemorial.org/quilt-history. ↩︎
21. Christopher Capozzola, “A Very American Epidemic: Memory Politics and Identity Politics in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, 1985–1993,” Radical History Review 2002, no. 82 (January 1, 2002): 91–109, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2002-82-91. ↩︎
22. Elinor Fuchs, “The Performance of Mourning,” American Theatre 9 (1993): 17. ↩︎
23. Names Project Foundation, The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, 1993. ↩︎
24. Jones quoted in Cindy Ruskin, The Quilt: Stories from the NAMES Project (New York: Pocket Books, 1988), 12. ↩︎
25. Carole Blair and Neil Michel, “The AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Contemporary Culture of Public Commemoration,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 10, no. 4 (2007): 607, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41940327. ↩︎
26. Richard Mohr, Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies (Massachussetts: Beacon Press, 1992), 115. ↩︎
27. Power, “Rites of Belonging.” ↩︎
28. Janis Jefferies, “Crocheted Strategies: Women Crafting Their Own Communities,” TEXTILE 14, no. 1 (January 2, 2016): 19, https://doi.org/10.1080/14759756.2016.1142788. ↩︎
29. Kate Wells, Edgard Sienaert, and Joan Conolly, “The ‘Siyazama’ Project: A Traditional Beadwork and AIDS Intervention Program,” Design Issues 20, no. 2 (2004): 75, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1512081. ↩︎
30. Wells, Sienaert, and Conolly, 77. ↩︎
31. Sabine Marschall, “Getting the Message Across: Art and Craft in the Service of HIV/AIDS Awareness in South Africa,” Visual Anthropology 17, no. 2 (April 1, 2004): 175, https://doi.org/10.1080/08949460490457074. ↩︎
32. Wells, Sienaert, and Conolly, 80. ↩︎
33. Marschall, “Getting the Message Across,” 164. ↩︎
34. Annie Coombs, “Positive Living: Visual Activism and Art in HIV/AIDS Rights Campaigns,” Journal of Southern African Studies 45, no. 1 (2019): 146, https://doi-org.virtual.anu.edu.au/10.1080/03057070.2019.1567161. ↩︎
35. Trent S. Newmeyer, “Knit One, Stitch Two, Protest Three! Examining the Historical and Contemporary Politics of Crafting,” Leisure/Loisir 32, no. 2 (January 1, 2008): 445, https://doi.org/10.1080/14927713.2008.9651417. ↩︎

About the Author

Kate Snashall is entering her third year at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, studying a double degree in a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) and a Bachelor of Art History and Curatorship. With a focus on late twentieth-century American art, Kate is particularly interested in the intersection of art and design with political and social movements. In her spare time, Kate is also heavily involved in the Australian contemporary art world, and is passionate about cooking, ocean swimming, and travelling.