"1989"   Like so many of you, I can reconstruct crucial segments of my life just from recalling a few names of those chosen from the countless stricken down by AIDS. I'll mention only three-two of them, Jack Smith and Cookie Mueller amongst the tributees of this portfolio, the third, Robert Mapplethorpe not here honored but a powerful illuminator of our culture. When I started my life in the art world in the mid 1960s, Jack Smith had already staked his claim on the wilder shores of metaphor. Amongst very much else, he transformed drag into Shakespearean fabulousness. The beauty of his films and performances alarmed me and many others into the awareness that not just gender but imagination had no borders. His demon genius still lurks in countless corners of art's empire. Somehow I still can't conceive of his departure. I met Robert Mapplethorpe when he was still feteshistically encasing collages made from homoporn and when I still thought I was straight. On Bond Street, in the 1970s, we became neighbors and friends. We watched and encouraged each other with a certain brotherly glee, as he grew into his artistic identity and I, belatedly, into my sexual identity. The cautionary documents posted on his door made me feel like an alien the first time I visited him in the hospital. Neither you nor I are likely to forget these three nor any of the tributees of this print portfolio. But countless, countless other artists were denied the opportunity to be publicly remembered - victims of the war begun, on our front, early in the 1980s. Now the battlegrounds were our own bodies. Many began to protest again; artists were on the front line. And, in the 1980s and 1990s, memorial services became a major part of our social lives. So many artists were denied the fruits of their first growth that it seemed like spring had been eliminated from our calendar. Of course, not just the young were stricken. Through the tears and the anger, new and stronger identities were often forged; but by the end of the century many of us became battle weary. We wanted to forget the war; maybe we even became overly optimistic about the power of new AIDS drugs. But we cannot and should not forget. The war rages on still menacing us in one way or another. What of the artists still with us? There are those like Nan Goldin, Jim Hodges, Frank Moore, and Kiki Smith who, in the memorializing of their and our loss, have turned that loss into hope, and beauty, humor, challenge, love, magic --- all those and more, without letting us lose sight of that loss (literally and figuratively). More obliquely, no less poetically, other artists confront and transmute the furies of the AIDS pandemic that has changed all of us. Artists compose the forefront of our culture's memory and the artist/tributors of this portfolio ask you to support with them an organization dedicated to keeping a vital part of our culture's memory in tact. Though its programs of digital archives, preservation of AIDS activist video and film, and dance, The Estate Project for Artists with AIDS tirelessly and valiantly preserves the voices of artists, both known and unknown, struck down by AIDS. To forget those voices would be to forget an important part of ourselves. -Klaus Kertess, New York City, May 2000 The "1989" portfolio is currently available for $10,000. For information please email estateproject@allianceforarts.org