For Day With(out) Art 2026, Visual AIDS revisits our 1998 poster AIDS IS OVER, RIGHT? (OR, MAYBE YOU SHOULD READ THE FINE PRINT) at a moment of renewed crisis.
The poster was inspired by conversations among Visual AIDS staff and Board members about the rapidly worsening conditions surrounding HIV and AIDS. In the United States, HIV prevention, tracking, and research programs have been gutted, while cuts to U.S. funding are disrupting HIV treatment and services around the world. The consequences will unfold over years: preventable illness and death that may happen too slowly to make headlines, but are no less devastating.
For Day With(out) Art 2026, Visual AIDS is distributing the poster free of charge to museums, galleries, universities, arts organizations, and other cultural spaces. At a time when HIV and AIDS are being pushed out of public view, we are asking cultural institutions to help interrupt that disappearance.
We invite organizations to display the poster on and around December 1, World AIDS Day, as part of Day With(out) Art, a global day of action and mourning in response to the heightening HIV and AIDS crisis.
This poster is available free of charge to museums, galleries, universities, arts organizations, and other cultural organizations participating in Day With(out) Art 2026. Limit one poster per institution. For special requests, including additional copies, please contact Visual AIDS at info@visualaids.org.
The full text of the poster is below:
AIDS is over, right?
(or maybe, you should read the fine print)
Forty-five years into the epidemic, there is still an AIDS-related death every minute. Millions of people still organize their lives around access to HIV medication, prevention, testing, and care. For many people living with HIV, survival once meant learning to live without certainty. Medication brought stability, and prevention brought hope. But survival depends on more than medication. It depends on clinics, testing programs, prevention services, transportation, and public funding. It depends on people making sure no one disappears from care. It depends on systems people rarely notice until they are taken away. That infrastructure is being dismantled. Cuts to U.S. HIV funding are disrupting the global AIDS response, threatening decades of hard-won progress. In places where HIV deaths had fallen dramatically, these cuts are contributing to the return of AIDS-related illness and death. The time to act is now. Forty-five years into the epidemic, people are still fighting stigma, misinformation, criminalization, isolation, and political neglect. AIDS is still here, but attention is disappearing. Cuts to prevention, education, research, and public health infrastructure often unfold quietly—too slowly for headlines, but never without consequence. HIV continues to disproportionately impact Black, Latine, queer, and transgender communities. Every statistic is a person. Every interruption is a life altered. Every silence is a choice. We witness cruelty when preventable suffering becomes politically acceptable. Progress is fragile. So it’s up to us to make it inevitable. AIDS is not over. Neither is this fight.
