Marlene McCarty

McCarty first became engaged in AIDS activism after the AIDS diagnosis of one of her close friends. Early on, she attended an ACT UP action at the United Nations and an action at Wall Street. She had some limited activism experience from her time in Europe, attending anti-atomkraft and women's movement protests.[2]

After several ACT UP demonstrations, John Lindell brought her into a Gran Fury artistic project for the New Museum because of her background as a graphic designer. It was to be a massive window production with a large team of ACT UP artists. McCarty was responsible for cutting out large rubber letters to make tombstones for the piece. It was "total gofer work" compared to what she was doing at her corporate job, but she bonded with the other people working on the project very quickly.[2]

A smaller group of the Gran Fury artists—McCarty, Lindell, Tom Kalin, and Donald Moffett—participated in an artistic demonstration at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut on 7th and A on the Lower East Side. The piece focused on safe sex, and the artists made slides with pornography and napkins with safe sex information on them. The piece was designed to blend into the environment of the nightclub so that the club attendants hardly noticed they walked into an art piece or an activist demonstration. It was after this piece that McCarty became a regular member of Gran Fury.[2]

After the King Tut's Wah Wah Hut piece, McCarty attended Gran Fury meetings once a week at Lindell's employer's office. The atmosphere at Gran Fury meetings was often charged and occasionally hostile.[2] Though several other women collaborated with Gran Fury over the course of its existence—including Anna Held and Amy Heard—McCarty developed a reputation as "the only woman in Gran Fury" because of her consistent participation.[2]

Though Gran Fury was primarily viewed as an artistic endeavor, McCarty always considered it their mission to be more to "get out certain messages that [they] felt like were not getting out into the mainstream world, which is why [they] adopted the mainstream look of advertising."[2] For McCarty, making art was always in service of their greater goal of engaging discussion.

Though a lot of Gran Fury's work was heavily text-based, McCarty mostly focused on the visual side of things.[2] Her major influences at the time were Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, whose styles are primarily text-based with legible, bold visuals. McCarty characterized Gran Fury's style as a very over-generalized, "flat-footed approach to really blunt topics."[2]

McCarty worked on several Gran Fury collaborations with other New York groups. She attempted to organize a collaboration with the Guerrilla Girls, but it fell through when they wouldn't take off their gorilla masks during meetings.[2] She successfully organized collaboration with the Prostitutes of New York (PONY) and Tabboo, also known as the painter Stephen Tashjian. The Tabboo collaboration went up in the New Museum, but McCarty didn't consider it a success due to what she felt was unclear messaging.[2]

Gran Fury was commissioned for several specific ACT UP endeavors. During the Wall Street Action in 1988, Gran Fury designed and distributed thousands of dollars of fake money with Gran Fury slogans printed on the back.[2]

McCarty's former employer at the Museum of Modern Art, Linda Shearer, invited Gran Fury to do a piece for the 1990 Venice Biennale, a Venice-based arts organization. Though there was much debate within Gran Fury as to whether they wanted to participate, they eventually decided that they would given the large international audience the Venice Biennale had and the accessibility of the Catholic Church as a target.

The piece that Gran Fury developed, familiarly called the “Pope Piece” targeted the New York Cardinal O’Connor, who was a frequent target of ACT UP actions due to his intense homophobia. The piece reprinted a quote from O’Connor under an image of the Pope to emphasize how O’Connor was a tool of the Pope. Even though they were O’Connor's words, they were sanctioned by the Pope. The piece paired the quote and image of the Pope with other Gran Fury slogans, including “AIDS Rears its Ugly Head,” “Men Use Condoms or Beat It,” and “AIDS Kills Women, Too.” [2]

The posters were extremely controversial, and the Gran Fury team encountered several obstacles. First, the pieces were halted in customs during transit and were only released after a sit-in in the Director's office. Though none of the pieces were illegal by American standards, Italy had its own free speech laws and all the artists faced potential criminal prosecution and imprisonment. The Church magistrates brought in to judge the work decided that it was not illegally blasphemous.[2] The Vatican was upset, and considered petitioning the Italian government to have them removed anyway, but the posters were still able to hang in the exhibit.[4]

In 1989, McCarty and Donald Moffett formed a trans-disciplinary art studio called The Bureau to try and have more creative control over the art they made, compared to in Gran Fury. The studio produced some Gran Fury work and some unaffiliated politically charged work as well. The studio lasted until 1999, when McCarty and Moffett felt like their work was getting less political and no longer served their original goal.[2]

The Bureau got involved in doing film titles in 1990 when McCarty requested to do them on Tom Kalin's, a fellow ACT UP and Gran Fury member, film Swoon. McCarty and the Bureau went on to provide the opening titles to many Hollywood movies including American Psycho, The Ice Storm, and I Shot Andy Warhol.[5]

McCarty continued to make art after Gran Fury and the Bureau both dissolved. She never became particularly involved in any non-Gran Fury initiative in ACT UP.[2]

McCarty has been working on an ongoing project entitled Murder Girls since 1995. The project focuses on portraits of girls who have murdered members of their families, in most cases their mothers. One of the first portraits McCarty drew was of the sixteen-year-old Marlene Olive, who, with the aid of her boyfriend, murdered both of her parents, Jim and Naomi Olive.[6]

McCarty's art since Gran Fury has primarily taken the form of ballpoint pen on large surfaces. She likes the blue ballpoint pen because it "reflects what high-school girls use for homework and for 'doodling on their notebooks.'"[7] She admits, though, that ballpoint pen is a "horrible, tedious, painful medium'" for the scale of her artwork. "'It can't be corrected."[7]