Silence = Death

Silence = Death is one of the most recognizable images of AIDS activism. The bold white words sit beneath a pink triangle on a black background. The design came from the Silence=Death Project, a six-person New York collective (Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarras) that formed in 1985 and created the poster in 1986, wheat-pasting it around Lower Manhattan. The pink triangle reclaims the badge that the Nazis forced gay men to wear in concentration camps. The protest group ACT UP, founded in 1987, adopted the image as a central symbol in its fight against government inaction during the epidemic. The slogan argues that staying silent in the face of a crisis amounts to complicity.