In response to an invitation to create works for the Art against AIDS benefit in 1987, General Idea appropriated the colors and stacked letter design of Robert Indiana’s widely quoted LOVE (1965), re-configuring it to read “AIDS.”

Producing posters, wallpaper, stamps, public sculpture, and billboards, General Idea spread their AIDS logo throughout art institutions and transportation systems in the United States and Europe, as well as in galleries, with the now-iconic series of AIDS paintings and wallpapers.

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.”