The stuff life is made of: five group shows in New York recently celebrated the work - and in many cases the memory - of artists caught in the HIV/AIDS epidemic - includes related article on AIDS/arts organizations - Art & AIDS

"Day Without Art/World AIDS Day

1996 Exhibition"

This scrappy gathering of works on paper was installed in a narrow, corridorlike space in the offices of Manhattan Borough President Ruth W. Messinger in Lower Manhattan, the only government office in the city to so acknowledge Day Without Art. It brought together figures familiar from the other shows (Berg, Cullum, De Hoyos, Guberman, Holliday, Trimmier, Trotter, Veras) with some not seen elsewhere (Bryan Hoffman, Michael Lee, Abnel Rodriguez, Steed Taylor and Wilmer Velez).

Taylor's pieces were standouts. Each is a dye-transfer print of a nude figure whose body has been elongated by a cut-and-paste process. Steed, who last season at Franklin Furnace showed a poignant series of childhood snapshots in which he had blacked-out his own figure, here seemed to be extending the images of friends and family members -- including his parents -- as if reluctant to let them remain finite in size.

"A Living Testament of

the Blood Fairies: Part II"

Finally, in January, Printed Matter opened a show of books, documents and ephemera titled "A Living Testament of the Blood Fairies: Part II," with Hendricks and Rodney Sur curating once again. It proved a worthy pendant to its predecessor.

A selection of fastidiously designed books by Buczak confirmed him to be an artist of exceptional breadth. And Senser's big, messy, collaged and painted books, with their vivid amalgam of infantine images and words writ large ("fear" recurred like a mantra), were far more dynamic than his sculptures.

Several artists appeared only in this venue. Jose Luis Cortes was one, with a cheerfully iconic gouacheon-newspaper portrait of the writer Reinaldo Arenas, who was imprisoned as a homosexual in his native Cuba and eventually died of AIDS in New York. Another was John Eric Broaddus (1943-1990), best known for his fantastic costumes, with two cutout, handpainted books. A third was Ann Craig (1951-1987), a performer, commemorated with the kind of personal objects that might be turned up in a bureau drawer: a cloth rose, a heart-shaped sea stone, a crumpled cigarette pack, a beat-up pocket notebook.

Also included were two much-admired but still undervalued American artists. Paul Thek (1933-1988) was represented by opened pages from two of his mesmerizing journals. One carries the watercolor image of a waterfall and the handwritten words "We are committing suicide, We are marked"; the other, an ink drawing of a seashell and the words "Mystics of the world unite." (A Thek retrospective, originating at Witte de With in Rotterdam, toured Europe last year, but no American venue could be found for it.)

Photocopied pages from a journal by writer-artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) were also displayed, crowded with notated studies for paintings and performances and detailed records of dreams that were the raw material of his crypto-autobiographical fiction. Suspended over the vitrines was a sculpture by Eric Rhein. An openwork plaque woven of metal wire and filament and ornamented with found bits of jewelry and chandelier crystal, it spells out a single word: "courage."