The New York Times - Tuesday, December 1, 1998
Edward Lewine

John Dugdale is a photographer who can barely see. In 1993 diseases resulting from infection by the AIDS virus took most of his vision and hearing. He thought he had months to live, but he's still here. That is why, Mr. Dugdale said, he is qualified to talk about the importance of a new on-line gallery of works by artists with AIDS.

"I am here to say that having a lasting record of my work would have been so important to me when I was suffering five years ago," said Mr. Dugdale, 38, whose work is also on display at the Wessel & O'Connor Gallery in Chelsea through Jan. 3. "I know what it would have been like for me to exit with no record."

The on-line gallery, the Virtual Collection (www.artistswithaids.org) is to have its premiere today, World AIDS Day, with ceremonies in five museums nationwide, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum. It has some 3,200 images of objects made by some 150 artists who are H.I.V.-positive, are dying from AIDS or have died. For many of the artists the Virtual Collection is a means to show their art to a wider audience and to feel that it will live on after them.

But the Virtual Collection is also meant to be a historical record of the AIDS era. It was founded by the Estate Project for Artists With AIDS, an eight-year-old program that helps H.I.V.-positive and AIDS-stricken artists. "This is not an art catalogue," said Randall Bourscheidt, president of the Alliance for the Arts, the nonprofit arts advocacy group in Manhattan that runs the Virtual Collection and the Estate project. "Our goal is to create something which is a powerful testament to the effect of this epidemic."

In the Virtual Collection each artist gets his own page. To the left is a 100- to 300-word biography of the artist. To the right are small images of 20 or so examples of the artist's work. Each of these images can be expanded by a double click of the mouse to larger-size, high-resolution digital pictures. Each picture is accompanied by detailed cataloguing, including size, medium and even a contact number for the artist or the estate.

Users can put together pieces by different artists and save them on their own private pages. This feature and the contact information are intended to allow teachers, curators and collectors to study objects in different combinations on line and borrow or buy the pieces themselves for exhibition in the real world. "The real gallery doesn't exist," said Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art. "These works are spread out; this is a way of bringing them together in a context."

There are a number of well-known artists on the Web site, including Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Cratsley and David Wojnarowicz, but most of the names are obscure. The only requirement for inclusion in the Virtual Collection is that the artist be H.I.V. positive or have AIDS and submit around 20 slides of his work. If the artist cannot make slides, the Estate Project will help them.

"Whether these are achieved works of art isn't for us to judge," Mr. Bourscheidt said. "The result we are striving for is to preserve the historical context of the artists' community during the AIDS crisis."

The Estate Project was founded in 1991 to address the fact that artists of all stripes, including painters, sculptors, writers, poets and choreographers were dying of AIDS and their works were being sold off, given away, or even thrown away. Among other things, the Estate Project raised money for groups in the mid-90's that were making slide archives of works by artists with AIDS. Slides, however, are fragile and inaccessible, so in 1995 the Estate Project decided to gather the images together and put them on line.

"This gives incredible access to these works," said Barbara Hunt, the director of Visual AIDS, an advocacy group in Manhattan that was the largest single source of slides along with groups in Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco. "It brings together archives from around the country."

In New York the Virtual Collection is to be celebrated today at the Museum of Modern Art with a public demonstration of the Web site at 10:45 A.M. The Brooklyn Museum has an exhibition of pieces by some artists in the Virtual Collection and there is to be a public reception for the artists at 6:30 this evening. And the Studio Museum in Harlem will display a computer with images by African-American artists in the Virtual Collection for today only.

No one is certain how many artists have H.I.V. and AIDS, but most of the advocates for artists with AIDS say there are many thousands of them. The director of the Estate Project and the Web site, Patrick Moore, said it was likely that the Virtual Collection would grow to over 6,000 images in the next few years. It costs around $150 to put one artist's works on line, he said, and the Estate Project plans to continue raising funds for the effort.

Mr. Moore said he hoped that the Virtual Collection would still be up and running long after the artists and many of their works had disappeared. "The reality is that not of all these artworks will survive," he said. "All we can do is preserve their images electronically."

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