General Idea AIDS (prototype), 1989/2021

In response to an invitation to create work for the Art against AIDS benefit in 1987, General Idea appropriated the colors and stacked letter design of Robert Indiana’s widely quoted LOVE (1966), re-configuring it to read “AIDS.”

Producing paintings, posters, wallpaper, postage stamps, public sculpture, and billboards, General Idea spread its AIDS logo throughout art institutions as well as the transportation and advertising systems of North America and Europe, with the now iconic series. As AA Bronson explained at the time: “We want to make the word AIDS normal... By keeping the word visible, it has a normalizing effect that will hopefully play a part in normalizing people’s relationship to the disease—to make it something that can be dealt with as a disease rather than a set of moral or ethical issues.”