Many of the most compelling artworks of the late-80s and early-90s engage the spector of AIDS--in sorrow, rage, and remembrance. Although most critics and curators are well aware of the importance of AIDS-themed works by artists like painter Ross Bleckner or photographer Duane Michals, few have a clue that artists and art-activists created an alternative body of street- and public artworks about AIDS that was far more influential. Remarkably, the iconic images or symbols of this plague are not made-for-TV movies, photojournalistic pictures, or schmaltzy pop songs, but the "NAMES Project Quilt," a community artwork, and two artist-conceived emblems, "Silence=Death" and the "Red Ribbon." Their effectiveness is testimony both to the power of art and the limits of popular culture.

Like everything touched by AIDS, the art it spawned has been relentlessly politicized and ruthlessly "mediated." Art about AIDS is, in part, a moving record of resistance to those who exploit tragedy for political gain or for the sensationalistic, commercial purposes of the media. The story of AIDS-public-art cannot be told without invoking the media: Art about AIDS was initially catalyzed by the excruciatingly "negative" pictures of people with AIDS featured on the nightly news and in the morning papers.

During the first few years of the epidemic-the early '80s--the media offered only images of emaciated AIDS "victims" and "disease carriers." They were not-so-subtly identified as either "innocent" or "guilty." Hemophiliacs and children were "innocent" victims, while gay men and IV drug users were "guilty." Is it any wonder that in such a climate the Gran Fury collective's outdoor art-banner annoucing that "All People With AIDS Are Innocent" caused a furor when it was exhibited at New York's Henry Street Settlement for the second Day Without Art in 1990? The first wave of AIDS art was produced with but one propagandistic purpose: to counter such horrific, media representations.

This single-minded response to social crisis brought modern art back to its roots. Two centuries ago, the painters of the French Revolution gave birth to modern art with images like David's famous "Death of Marat" (1793). There was nothing extraordinary about depicting a martyred leader. But David's depiction upended three centuries' precedent: He painted a contemporary figure as he was--a man with an incurable skin disease soaking in a tub. David neither idealized nor allegorized him.

Since then, artists and theorists have debated the role of art in time of crisis. If Picasso's "Guernica" (1937)--the painter's up-to-the-minute portrayal of Franco's bombing of a Basque village--is the exemplary, 20th-century, political artwork, it is also an anomaly from an era when painting jettisoned its social moorings in order to explore the characteristics of form and abstraction. AIDS activists and artists found few role models in modern art. They instead revitalized public art, producing symbols and icons, posters and memorials such as the AIDS quilt. Their public artworks reached millions.

Back in the mid-80s, photography seemed like an effective way to confront both the demoralizing media imagery about AIDS and the threat of the cunningly unstoppable virus. But its mechanical grounding in the appearance of reality would prove to be nearly useless in dealing with a syndrome lacking visual chartacteristics. What does AIDS look like? Well-intentioned, mostly lesbian and gay, photographers produced hundreds of sympathetic portraits of people with AIDS, images of PWAs living with--rather than dying from--HIV disease. But their portraits are often unsettlingly difficult to figure out. Just who are their smiling subjects, these perfectly average looking Joes and Janes?

A furor arose with the first high-profile presentation of pictures of people with AIDS. In 1988, the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed portraits by Nicholas Nixon, who is neither gay nor afflicted with HIV. His serial images of the declining health of people with AIDS offer an unsentimentalized, sometimes grim record of courage and despair in the face of death. Members of ACT-UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) protested the negativity they saw in Nixon's work with a picture-side teach-in. (This was one of two anti-MOMA demonstrations ACT-UP staged that year; the other protested the exclusion of AIDS-activist graphics from the museum's "Committed to Print" show.)

Nixon's pictures are, in fact, often grim accounts of the virus' murderous capability, but they are also a welcome record of its effect on a diverse, not-always-gay population of heterosexual women-of-color and hemophiliacs. As the first body of work exhibited on an extremely public stage, they also suffered from impossible expectations. Like Jonathan Demme's "Philadelphia" (1993)--the first Hollywood film about AIDS--Nixon's pictures were somehow expected to appeal to everybody: To simultaneously win over bigoted or uncommitted museum goers; and to foment activism and buck up the spirits of people with AIDS. No single body of work could possibly work such magic.

The broadsheets the ACT-UPpers distributed at MOMA demanded both "no more pictures without [political] context" and images of PWAs "who are loving, vibrant, sexy and acting up." An abyss seemed to separate Nixon's controversial "negative" imagery from the blandly "positive" portraiture of the photographer-sympathizers. If portraying people with AIDS wasn't the answer, many observers wondered, how could art help change minds and alleviate this crisis?

Gran Fury, an artists' collective that operated as New York ACT UP's propaganda office, offered another "answer"--actually another modus operandi--by creating a strikingly public, non-museum role for art attempting to combat the epidemic. (Gran Fury primarily comprised Richard Elovich, Avram Finkelstein, Tom Kalin, John Lindell, Loring McAlpin, Marlene McCarty, Donald Moffett, Michael Nesline, Terry Riley, Mark Simpson and Robert Vasquez.) Rejecting portraits of people with AIDS, the group instead gave visual form to the shocking statistics emanating daily from the federal Centers for Disease Control and New York's Department of Health. Gran Fury formulated an ambitious agenda to provide the "context" other Act-UPpers had found lacking in Nixon's work. Its members wanted to dispense essential information that the government wasn't. They targeted the street, rather than the gallery, and they recognized that images are far more empowering when accompanied by words of explanation and elaboration.

The collective's graphic streetworks that began to appear in 1988 married the methods of art, advertising, and education. They cut a wide psychic swath across the AIDS landscape. One print offered the alarming news that one in 61 babies born in New York is HIV positive and another wittily cajoled men to "Use Condoms or Beat It." Gran Fury's first institution-sponsored graphic admonished artworldings to fight AIDS, because "With 47,524 Dead, Art Is Not Enough." The toll, of course, continued to mount.

The artworld is an eco-system--curators often collaborate with artists, and imagery sometimes travels from street to gallery, and then back again. Gran Fury came into being with the encouragement of activist-curator William Olander, who invited the ACT UP committee that later became Gran Fury to create a piece for the New Museum of Contemporary Art's window on bustling, lower Broadway in Soho. Olander commissioned the installation because he'd been so impressed by the highly-visible work of another collective allied with--but predating--ACT UP called the Silence = Death Project.

This group's six, (anonymous) gay men conceived the graphic emblem that has become synonymous with ACT UP and AIDS activism: SILENCE=DEATH printed in white type beneath a pink triangle, all set on a black ground. To create it, they inverted the pink triangle the Nazis forced homosexuals to wear in concentration camps--and which gay activists of the seventies had already "appropriated" as a symbol of gay liberation. A neon version of the logo was a central element in "Let the Record Show," ACT UP's feisty installation at the New Museum indicting the Reagan-Bush administrations's inaction on AIDS. It now hangs in the museum's collection.

As Gran Fury's artful propaganda grew more self-assured, it increasingly migrated to more established and better-funded locations. In these public (and often publicly funded) sites, it also generated non-stop controversy. The group's famous Benetton-ad-inspired image of three, interracial, homo- and heterosexual couples kissing above the caption "Kissing doesn't kill: Greed and indifference do," raised hackles across the country as part of Art Against AIDS's "Art On the Road" project in 1990. Their placement on the side of Chicago buses, for instance, prompted one Chicago alderman to call the print "an incitement to homosexuality." Gran Fury's contribution to the Venice "Bienalle" the same year, nearly got the group prosecuted for obscenity.

Bear in mind that the "Bienalle" is the most prestigious of regular international exhibitions; an invitation to participate telegraphs the news that an artist (or, in this case, an art collective) has arrived. Gran Fury seized the opportunity to export its hell-raising methods to Europe. Its so-called "Pope Piece" paired two billboard-sized panels: one coupled the image of the pope with a text about the church's anti-safe-sex rhetoric; the other a two-foot-high erect cock with texts about women and condom use. Italian authorities--including "Bienalle" officials--considered prosecuting the group for blasphemy. Only the intervention of sympathetic magistrates precluded an international scandal.

Gran Fury's spectacular entrance into the public arena coincided with an epochal, once-in-a-century shift in consciousness. This passage from modernism to post-modernism meant that what could be seen only as an artist's protest poster in the context of the Vietnam War, could, 20 years later, be regarded as art. It also linked Gran Fury's work with a number of key art-players of the moment, such as Barbara Kruger and Hans Haacke. This was hardly an accident. The savvy, art-school-educated members of Gran Fury consciously looked to such art for inspiration, while supportive critics such as Douglas Crimp perceptively and persuasively made the case for Gran Fury's activism-as-art. The same, feminist-derived identity politics that, en masse, brought art by people of color and queers into the artworld, heightened the visibility of art about AIDS.

In addition to "Silence=Death", two other public artworks--the "Ribbon Project" (or Red Ribbon) and the "NAMES Project Quilt" --have come to symbolize the AIDS crisis. Like Silence=Death, the Red Ribbon was created by an artists' collective, the Visual AIDS's Artists' Caucus. (The Visual AIDS group--founded in 1989 in New York by Gary Garrels, Tom Sokolowski, Bill Olander and mystelf--produces the annual "Day Without Art" on December 1, among other educational projects and events.) The Artists' Caucus produced the Ribbon to subvert the onslaught of gooey jingoism unleashed by the Gulf War and embodied in the yellow ribbon. (At the time, the Artists' Caucus comprised Penny Arcade, Allan Frame, Marc Hoppel, Ira McCrudden, Frank Moore, Michael Stohlbach and Jerry Tartaglia.) But what exactly are "Silence=Death" and the "Red Ribbon?" Emblems? Symbols? Logos? Artworks? Or all of the above? Some readers who have no problem accepting that printed streetworks are art, may be troubled by such a suggestion. Like other conceptual, non-object artworks, Silence=Death can't be bought or sold. But art is more than objectmaking; it is also our culture's primary visual means of awareness. (That's why Hollywood and Madison Ave. borrow so much from contemporary artists.) In philosopher Hans Magnus Enzensberger's words, art is a branch of the consciousness industry.

The "NAMES Project Quilt" (organized in San Francisco by activist Cleve Jones and now headquartered in Washington, DC) is that rare phenomenon in contemporary culture, a genuine community artwork with no initial connection to artists or art schools. Typically known simply as the "AIDS Quilt," and composed of more than 50,000 three-by-six-foot, quilted, appliqued and collaged rectangles of fabric, it commemorates fully 20 percent of the AIDS deaths in this country. Since 1986, participants have created these quilt components for friends, lovers or public figures like Arthur Ashe, Rock Hudson, and Michel Foucault. Images of pets, military medals, and drag queens coexist with slap-dash calligraphy, campy humor and heart-rending tributes from loved ones. "Love you, Mark" takes on new, poignant meaning when it's signed in glitter by Mom, Dad, and Lover Steve.

Intended to be anonymous, the "Red Ribbon" was designed as a symbol of commitment to people with AIDS and the AIDS-struggle. It debuted on the televised Tony Award cermemonies in late spring of 1991 and six months later you couldn't turn on the tube without seeing it: at the Emmies, the People's Choice Awards, and the Oscars; at sports events like the US Open; at Freddie Mercury's "Concert for Life" in London; and on Presidential candidate Jerry Brown's lapel. The Republican handlers who removed it from Barbara Bush's bodice at the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston appreciated its apparently subversive message. But by then, the Ribbon--like any successful "media" artwork--had already assumed a life of its own. Its apotheosis as the best-known emblem of the early 90s led to its mid-decade oversaturation as a jeweled fashion accessory and computer screen-saver. In the weirdly freeform realm of symbols, it also came to represent the frustration many AIDS activists felt in the wake of the 1992 elections.

The ever-expanding quilt is too large to be exhibited in its entirety. Its national debut took place in 1987 on the mall in Washington, DC. Like Maya Lin's nearby "Vietnam War Memorial"--whose black granite walls are inscribed with the names of the deceased in the chronological order of their deaths--the "NAMES Project Quilt" is shocking for its concreteness. But unlike the memorial's haunting testimony to the facelessness of death, the Quilt is a passionate affirmation of diversity. Nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1988, the Quilt helped give the plague--and its sufferers--a human face.

Some AIDS activists have criticized both the "NAMES Project Quilt" and the "Red Ribbon" for their mild-mannered mode of address. But they miss the point. By the end of the 80s, the AIDS crisis had directly affected millions of Americans--PWAs and their families, friends, and caregivers. The Quilt helps attend to the needs of those mourning AIDS losses. The "Red Ribbon" is a bridge to non-AIDS-involved audiences; a gentle first step--its founders hoped--on the road to active support of PWAs. The "NAMES Project Quilt" and the "Red Ribbon" helped transform AIDS from a syndrome that dare not speak its name, to a subject that could be sympathetically raised in "People" magazine and at least acknowledged by those seeing entertainment industry darlings (and role models) strut their stuff at televised events.

Some AIDS activists have criticized both the "NAMES Project Quilt" and the "Red Ribbon" for their mild-mannered mode of address. But they miss the point. By the end of the 80s, the AIDS crisis had directly affected millions of Americans--PWAs and their families, friends, and caregivers. The Quilt helps attend to the needs of those mourning AIDS losses. The "Red Ribbon" is a bridge to non-AIDS-involved audiences; a gentle first step--its founders hoped--on the road to active support of PWAs. The "NAMES Project Quilt" and the "Red Ribbon" helped transform AIDS from a syndrome that dare not speak its name, to a subject that could be sympathetically raised in "People" magazine and at least acknowledged by those seeing entertainment industry darlings (and role models) strut their stuff at televised events.

In order to shift public opinion, to alter the psychic landscape, such symbolic works must, paradoxically, emphasize their "publicness" and distance from the artworld. This also connects them with Dada-esque, guerrilla events: Performance art-like demonstrations where protesters drop and others render the contours of their fallen bodies in chalk, or a clandestine action in which Queer Nation encased biblethumping Senator Jesse Helms' suburban, Washington home in a gargantuan condom. But there's also a continuum linking these guerrilla actions to mainstream events and observations--such as the annual skyline-dimming "Night Without Light" or the application of a huge Red Ribbon to the Eiffel Tower for a United Nations' AIDS conference--and to art itself.

The Museum of Modern Art's sponsorship of artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres's outdoor, photo-billboards of his own empty, rumpled bed completed shortly after his lover's AIDS-related death is an historic, but little discussed milestone of 1992. It suggests how fully AIDS has radicalized art institutions. While works like Gonzalez-Torres's have forebears in conceptual and feminist art of the seventies', before the epidemic major museums had never sponsored such provocative work at the time of its creation.

The American AIDS crisis will eventually pass, if know-nothing zealots don't undermine every effort to educate and distribute needles, or to support PWAs and needed research. (As AmFAR founder Matilda Krim noted long ago "each step in the escalation of the AIDS crisis was predictable, and could have been countered.") The suffering caused by AIDS--and those who refuse to treat it as a public health matter--is incalculable. In the not-so-distant future, though, one paradigmatic, public artwork-a memorial nothing like the pedestrian monuments that have been produced in places like Key West--might someday be completed.

San Francisco artist Rudy Lemcke conceived his memorial, "The Garden," as a river of stones flowing over black granite, complemented by bronzed boulders that double as seating. To grace its granite walls he's chosen the touching inscription from Walt Whitman: "...comrades mine and I in their midst, and their memory ever to keep." It's difficult to imagine a more affirming response to an epidemic that's transformed the West Coast epicenter of American, gay life.

Lemcke chose Harvey Milk Plaza for the site of his Zen-inspired, place of meditation. Located at the Market-and-Castro-streets entrance to one of the world's preeminent gay ghettoes, this plaza is named after the city's first openly gay supervisor, who was the target of a crazed assassin's bullet in 1978. This highly symbolic location reminds us that the struggles of the past must be commemorated and institutionalized.