Artist, Donald Moffett: This work was a creative act. It took time and effort and thought and dreaming and perseverance.
I’m Donald Moffett, artist with a deep interest in citizenship.
This is the He Kills Me poster, as it’s referred to, which has a picture of Ronald Reagan with a particular smirk on his face. It’s two very, very discrete visuals. On the left is a fluorescent orange and black shooting target, and on the right is a black and white image of Reagan with the copy line, “he kills me.” You know, it was about Reagan’s lack of concern, lack of engagement.
AIDS came on a little slow because the information was so slow, so you kept feeling this creep into a new world, really. I had a lot of desperation, fury. But I recall it being a struggle to figure out what to do with what was fucking with my mind.
I was probably working on it in ‘86. At this point, I was involved in a graphic design studio, and I wasn’t very happy, shit was going down. It was right about the same time where people were just dying, on the one hand, and those that weren’t felt incredibly frustrated and angry. There was this moment where A led to B, and in my after hours, I started making He Kills Me and some street activism.
My good friend Michael Moran and I, we pasted it at night. That was the means of distribution until it was given to ACT UP where then it became a protest tool. ACT UP stands for the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. It was an explosive street movement, basically to protest the lack of information, response, drugs, progress on a deadly disease that was extremely targeted at that point.
This attitude right here that was formed in ACT UP and Gran Fury and under those circumstances has reappeared. And it’s not necessarily that activism is still there in every waking moment of my day, but it’s about this dilemma of art and where we are as people.