It is an appropriate show for an unseasonably warm fall day: A wall-sized grid of 155 images of leaves crafted from matte-black wire absorbs the brilliant sunlight in the gallery. Each work is a tender tour-de-force, a portrait-tribute to a friend of artist Eric Rhein who has died of AIDS. The effect is oddly comforting: There's Terry with the Healing Hands and Orsini the Sky Painter, playfully titled works that must conjure up a flood of bittersweet nostalgia for Rhein. Leaves is his memory bank, an elegy, that-until recently-we might have considered an old man's art form.

Rhein isn't old--he is 37--and, as in so many other arenas, the Lazarus effect is being felt in the art world. Rhein conceived the show in 1996 following the initiation of his successful course of treatment with protease inhibitors. "I was at an artists colony in New England, which I wouldn't have been healthy enough to even attend a year earlier," he recalls. "And I had what I can only call a mystical experience. I was walking on the grounds in autumn leaves and I felt like the spirits of those who'd died were supporting me, teaching me to walk again." Rhein picked up leaves that reminded him of particular friends' physical traits and the project was born. It continues to grow and as Rhein adds works to it, he also reserves the right to remake any piece that is sold so that this personal archive will remain intact.

Leaves is a perfect emblem of what's going on in the AIDS-art world today. We have entered the institutional phase in two senses. Not only has the character of AIDS-related art changed--it now bears little resemblance to the challenging and outward-looking works that characterized the heyday of AIDS-art in the late eighties and early nineties--but so, too, has the nature of art-world initiatives to support artists with HIV.

This year's Day Without Art, the art world's "international day of mourning and action in response to the AIDS crisis" organized by Visual AIDS each December 1st, showcased the premiere of the Virtual Collection at museums and universities throughout the country. (Disclosure: I was a co-founder of Visual AIDS in 1989 but am no longer involved with the organization) A project of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, the Virtual Collection is an expanding data base of 3000 digitized images of artworks created by 150 artists either lost to AIDS or living with HIV. To compile the data, the Estate Project's director Patrick Moore worked with Visual AIDS, Visual AIDS Boston, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, and San Francisco's Visual Aid, organizations which have not only developed regional slide-archives, but also supply materials or other services to artists. (The Estate Project for Artist with AIDS is a project of New York's Alliance for the Arts.)

A scholarly and curatorial resource to be housed in museums and universities, the Virtual Collection is also available online at www.artistswithaids.org, although at lower resolution and without some of the innovative software developed for it. (The Internet Explorer 4.0 browser, downloadable for free, is currently a requirement for viewing the Virtual Collection.) Visit the site to see images by artists from around the country fleshed out with biographical information. The institutional version offers viewers the sort of digital bells and whistles associated with CD-ROMs including searches by medium or geography, and the ability to collate images for virtual exhibitions on-screen.

At the Museum of Modern Art observance inaugurating the Virtual Collection on December 1st, Kinshasha Holman Conwill, Director of the Studio Museum of Harlem, noted that "For artists invisibility is a kind of death." The corollary is that for most artists, making art is synonymous with being alive. Art history is filled with examples; Matisse made his brilliant cut-paper works of the fifties from his bed when he was no longer able to paint. Far more moving, of course, are the many stories of young artists like the talented Los Angeles painter Tony Greene who refused to die until his last show was safely hanging on gallery walls. Just before the show opened at Feature gallery in New York in late 1990, he told me that completing it had added meaning to what would be his final days. "I'm thrilled knowing it's done," he said. "I feel much more resolved." Serving artists means serving their work.

But just as American society-at-large is conflicted about where we are vis-à-vis AIDS, so too is the art world. This conflict was a subtext of the recent Day Without Art. Consider Visual AIDS' annual Day Without Art poster. The 1998 incarnation features an image of an apple pie and a text that begins: "AIDS. It's not a problem anymore-right, Mom?" It goes on to enumerate a depressing litany of facts, noting that 25% of those who become infected with HIV are under the age of twenty and that in 1997, 55% of Americans believed they could become infected by sharing a glass of water. (This is 7% more than subscribed to this idiocy in 1991.) As the poster proclaims, the epidemic continues to rage, even though we know that conditions have improved for some people.

Can such seemingly contradictory views of the current status of AIDS be reconciled? Perhaps the challenge is asserting that AIDS is both past and present by advocating a far more nuanced view than is generally held now. As prevention theorist Michael Wright recently pointed out, the issue is psychological as well as statistical: "I still see campaigns for ASOs (AIDS service organizations) which characterize AIDS as an emergency situation. In the beginning AIDS was an emergency, but no emergency lasts seventeen years." He (and many others) believe that it's time to jettison the military metaphors of the national-security-style emergency and replace them with the sobering view that for some Americans, at least, there has been progress, but that daunting public health, education and civil rights dilemmas remain.

The epidemic has certainly validated Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's conceptual framework of mourning--anger and denial invariably preceding acceptance and psychological integration. Art has always played a role in coming to terms with collective tragedy. The role of the artist has often been to bear witness: Surely an art-of-memory like Eric Rhein's can help harmonize our views of the past and present. It suggests that honoring the past is one way to live more fully in the present.

Does the Virtual Collection signify the belief that the epidemic is past? It is a reminder that some AIDS-art has already entered history. Many brilliant artists showcased in its initial online presentation-Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz among them--are long dead. Their work has been institutionalized: it hangs in museums and private collections, and its fate has been entrusted to galleries handling those artists' estates. In the case of artists who never had--or are yet to have--careers that ensure the preservation of their work, the Virtual Collection offers a record that may also lead to the work's physical survival. All this work--known and unknown--is the stuff of history. Happily it is now more available to scholars and curators who can interpret and make it accessible. Posterity will ultimately determine its value; but art history is only a record of what survives.

When Patrick Moore concluded his demonstration of the Virtual Collection on December 1st with an image of Silence=Death, the collective pulse quickened in the Museum of Modern Art's auditorium. While exemplary paintings and photographs by such artists as Ross Bleckner, Keith Haring, and Nan Goldin have entered the object-oriented canon of recent art history, many of the most remarkable artistic innovations were public projects and actions. No schmaltzy Elton John song or sappy Jonathan Demme film ever gave the syndrome a human face or inspired activism. Instead, it was artists who took up the task of creating the emblems and community artworks identified with AIDS, including the NAMES Project Quilt, Silence=Death, and the Red Ribbon Project.

Of course, the idea of what constitutes art history needs to be democratized. And AIDS has put pressure on the institutionalized "system" of art history, just as it has revealed the inadequacies of so many others. Although Moore is quick to point out that the Virtual Collection is not an activist project, this isn't entirely true. In addition to presenting works like Silence=Death, he is also busily ensuring the preservation of activist videotapes by the likes of James Wenzy, Catherine Gund Saalfield and Greg Bordowitz. Their tapes are being remastered and will be available at the New York Public Library, and eventually online.

Current art related to the epidemic suffers in comparison to the epochal achievements of the late eighties and early nineties. En masse, art about AIDS not only engaged many of the best artists of that moment, but also (finally) cracked the artworld closet, helped complete the feminist project of identity-related art, and further activist aims. That fewer emerging artists are making works about AIDS today isn't surprising: AIDS is no longer generally experienced as an emergency and artists typically want to create something new. Perhaps more important, the symbiotic relationship between art, activism, and the media no longer holds.

You didn't have to be interested in art to know about AIDS-art. For five years beginning in 1986, it regularly appeared on front pages andTV screens. Silence=Death and the NAMES Project Quilt burst onto the scene in 1986 before Ronald Reagan had uttered the word AIDS in public and the biggest AIDS-news of the decade thus far had been unsavory accounts of Rock Hudson's death. In 1988 the exhibition of Nicholas Nixon's unsentimentalized photos of people with AIDS catalyzed an ACT UP demonstration at the Museum of Modern Art demanding images of PWAs "who are loving, vibrant, sexy and acting up." (Today, many of us are appalled to see so many healthy looking people with AIDS smiling at us from pharmaceutical ads.) The same year, gay opponents torpedoed San Francisco artist Rudy Lemcke's Zen-inspired AIDS memorial, The Garden, because they objected to $250,000 being privately raised for art, instead of research or treatment. In 1989, Witnesses Against Our Vanishing, a show of often funky, AIDS-themed art nearly brought down the National Endowment for the Arts when it opened at Artists Space in New York. Too AIDS- and too sex positive, it came just six months after the Ring-wing assault on Piss Christ -maker Andres Serrano (too sacreligious), five month after the cancellation of Robert Mapplethorpe's exhibition at the Corcoran in Washington, DC (too queer), and one month before the first Day Without Art. Who knows? Without AIDS, the Culture Wars might still be a bush-league skirmish in the Bible Belt.

Gran Fury, the collective that emerged from an ACT UP project at New York's New Museum, deserves its own chapter in the story of public AIDS-artworks Not only did the collective nearly get itself indicted for obscenity for exhibiting its stunning Pope Piece, which skewered the Pope for his lethal, anti-safe-sex beliefs at the 1990 Venice Biennale, but went on to raise hackles in this country in 1989-90: for its street-spanning banner for a Day Without Art exhibition at the Henry St. Settlement in New York that read "All People With AIDS Are Innocent," and for its famous Benetton-ad-inspired image of three, interracial, homo- and heterosexual couples kissing above the caption "Kissing doesn't kill: Greed and indifference do." When it appeared on the sides of busses as part of Art Against AIDS's "Art on the Road" project, it prompted a Chicago alderman to call the work "an incitement to homosexuality."