You also had some work that was called The Subway Drawings, and they're very abstract, those drawings. And I think you—all you have to do is, if you pay attention to the debates over Truvada use, a lot of those things are revealed. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: It looks pretty similar. Those are the most useful social ways that we—social explanations we give for the importance of this moment. And then we got a little carried away." AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Yeah, but I felt very strongly about that strategically. CYNTHIA CARR: In your—in your Artforum piece. So I graduated in three years instead of four. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Yeah, I mean, Boston was a very political place to be and a very great place to be at that moment. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: The Helix Queer Performance Network is Dan Fishback's project that he assembled, which is the Hemispheric Institute, La MaMa, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange, BAX. I was not interested in Artforum. Home, Avram Finkelstein 2020. The NSA. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: —and out of saying it. But Gran Fury decided that—because I felt like it didn't make any sense at all to just say, "Kissing doesn't kill. And we had a—we ended up having a day and a half in time. So what if we used Benetton to reimagine what the world might look like if we ran that company? This interview is part of the Archives of American Art Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics and administrators. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Right. But that almost has nothing to do with it. Oh yeah, in fact all of this is in NYU now, but there's the picture in the Daily News is me and my boyfriend at the time, Simon Doonan, and Chris Lione who was in the Silence = Death collective right there in the smack dab in the middle of the Daily News photograph. Russian propaganda textiles. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: I must have been 4 to 6 years old, somewhere in there. And then you stayed in Boston for—. CYNTHIA CARR: Yeah, yeah. CYNTHIA CARR: And they hadn't called you or anything to say? AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: So I drew a painting of a—I was so influenced by Matisse, and I drew an outline of a woman, a nude, and I was so embarrassed that I had done it that I started painting inside and outside her—these lines to sort of obscure it. So on one side was the schedule and the mailer, the address. So, basically, what we were attempting to do in that poster was to circle back to the questions of race and gender that we did not put into Silence = Death, but were supposed to be what the original poster was going to be about. Which is why the definition of AIDS being based on cohort studies of gay men was a lot easier to do than one that involved people without healthcare, people of differing genders, people with different racial and ethnic—backgrounds and experiences. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And so, in a way, I'm not saying that it was predestined—but I feel like I don't know how I would be the person I am today if it hadn't been—for having gone through that. But I think what's super interesting to me is that that is what it was like at this moment. Okay. They were probably even more proliferate than Starbucks. CYNTHIA CARR: And then in '90, we get the—they go after David Wojnarowicz, and Annie Sprinkle—. And so we came up with this idea, which we thought was very mild, actually. And then it was in New York, and Creative Time got involved there with—that was with funding it? We were building a home. So I had—and both lives were—both lines were long— and equally as strong. Which we mounted in December in Berlin. It was also part of this communal experience that was also deadly serious at the same time. We assembled the collective and my question to them was "okay, we're able to go into the New Museum and participate in the Draftsmen's Congress, but what does that mean? We didn't—you didn't tell me about—maybe you were working on it earlier, but you didn't say anything to me about it until that summer.". We would then come back to the larger general meeting after having worked on them, to show what we had done and get feedback. So even that aspect of it has been recreated. To like explore what this, you know, this terrible thing, in all of its complexity—what was happening to us, and it was the only way I knew how to do it. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: I've done about 20. If you know anything about law, it's not about having killed someone; it's about having put them at risk or having conspired to put them at risk. And there was a Prison Issue Day —that Gran Fury made posters for those five. Genocide of all non-whites, non-males, non-heterosexuals? AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: A kiss-in. Well, I think we should say for the record, that there's a large erect penis on this poster. It just wasn't—the magistrates hadn't come by the time the opening happened. So the messages that were written, I know for a fact were something like, "Don't balk at safe sex." But I wasn't a part of that, except when the committee asked the Silence = Death Collective if we would have trouble with them doing a neon sign of it. So we didn't formally dissolve at that point, but half of the collective just stopped coming. Of which we are a part. [Affirmative.] Thousands of works of art, artifacts and archival materials are available for the study of portraiture. CYNTHIA CARR: For sure. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And I knew someone at CISPES so I asked—I asked them about it. About how it would be structured, how it could be organized, how it would be funded, what its purview might be. It was bad. We used the streets, so I suggested to the collective that we do a poster about AIDS, about the politics of AIDS, and that was the Silence = Death poster. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: He talked about that piece because he curated that show. Such was the moment, years ago, when I became aware of the Silence = Death poster. It entirely shifted the responsibility for mediating exposure to HIV/AIDS to people living with HIV. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: But it wasn't until AIDS that my politics really became my own. Avram has 13 jobs listed on their profile. There were people who felt like it was overly wordy and didactic. It was my first Flash Collective and it was the—they asked me to come up and do a lecture for their —they have an HIV/AIDS lecture series, and then asked me if I would do a workshop afterwards, and I was beginning to think about these questions. And the Flash Collectives go anywhere from two hours to a day; some of them have been a day and a half, and it means at the end of that time you're going to have to have arrived at a political thing that you want to say with a group of strangers and mount it in a public space, which in a way is an exercise in social engagement. Which some people in the collective hated and I kind of loved. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: So, I think it's important to understand that it—during the moment of the making of the window, but also that, within that first year or so, Gran Fury was not a separate collective or—it came to be thought of as an affinity group and then later as a collective. So when you—how did you settle on that phrase of Silence = Death? And he didn't want the collective to dissolve. We did it all over Manhattan. So, this invitation came across the desk at Hemi, and Dan lunged at it. Okay. Well just to go back in the group of six, were some of them—had people been tested themselves? It was papered with manifestos and meeting notes and it was like literally every square inch was papered over with information, and I thought—I remembered, when young people needed to communicate with each other that's what we did. And we said, "Sure." AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Yeah. Like, I did one very recently about displacement which, if you think about it—it was loosely based—the collective that I assembled wanted to—chose that topic, and they chose it because of what's happening in Syria. Tom Kalin wrote a piece about AIDS in the media. But I think I went to—Jim Fouratt did that Easter be-in at sheep meadow. And the effect that it was having on the AIDS crisis and the—we were pointing a finger saying they were responsible for an increased death toll as a result of that. Like no one would hire him because of the insurance. We're talking about a million people on the sidelines of New York; it's like shooting fish in a barrel. But we decided, subsequently, when we did our first commission project in America, which was—a few months after this we began to work on that—which was the Kissing Doesn't Kill image. It's actually in the back of the—. Playwrights Horizons today announced a new rotating public art series to be displayed on the front of the company's 42nd Street building, beginning on January 19, 2021, with new work by … He was a reflection of that world. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And then I came out like that [snaps]. You did this project also at the New Museum—, CYNTHIA CARR: —and the artist who had people—encouraged people to come in and draw on the walls. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: We basically—when he came to us and we negotiated separately with Cee. I still have Passover with them. It wasn't Meese. CYNTHIA CARR: Under the words, ''Sexism Rears Its Unprotected Head.'' AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And I did—I did a piece, a very large wall with vinyl that was based on the images of Leigh Bowery with a safety pin through his lips—, AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And the phrase "Read My Lips" as a sort of way to connect the AIDS agitprop with Leigh Bowery's life because Bowery did not—was not political in a way—, AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: —and I sort of thought—I saw him as being incredibly political, and he saw himself as being political but not in any overt way—. You were drawing right? AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Every other aspect of it, the color, the font, the subject, the, you know, we originally were going to—Bill Buckley had made that call for tattooing HIV positive people, and that was in 1986. And I thought it would be good if you could read the texts from Silence = Death, and then from the AIDSGATE one. And they were throwing rocks. Which we can talk more about when we talk about the politic—. They were just so spirited and plugged in and incisive and joyful and thankful. I doubt I did that—. The project we did there was done in three hours. That's why I've done this book, is to re-contextualize the work. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: So it was—it became such a firestorm that they in fact introduced a bill into the Illinois state legislature to make it illegal to depict same-sex couples kissing in public transportation in the state of Illinois. [Affirmative] So they had just found, or just developed the antibody test at that point, or released it actually. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: "Don't balk at safe sex." One—there were actually three ideas that made, according to my journals, into the top three voting positions over a period of weeks. When we would put a poster up in New York, it would get torn down or graffitied or covered with another poster. Sarah Schulman, the great Sarah Schulman's, Gentrification of the Mind; she talks about New York as having been a space where you could make mistakes. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: It was—it was bilingual. 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