The Alliance for the Arts initiated the Estate Project in 1991 to respond to the unprecedented impact of AIDS on American culture and to provide estate planning advice to artists with HIV/AIDS. Much of our current work focuses on the preservation of artworks and the creation of archives comprised of visual artworks, films, videos, musical scores, dances and manuscripts, as well as developing research tools and finding aids for dispersed collections. The Estate Project has built a groundbreaking Web site www.artistswithaids.org that allows the general public, curators and historians access to this material. Recent preservation initiatives include pioneering the use of digital imaging in visual art with the Virtual Collection; creating models of video and film preservation; testing tested new digital technologies for recording choreography; and collecting, cataloguing and promoting music created by composers lost to AIDS. The Estate Project has both presented this work in public venues such as the Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Parsons School of Design, and integrated this work into mainstream collections such as the New York Public Library, the Academy Film Archive, and the Fales Library of New York University.

EDITOR'S NOTE

The Experience Exchange was a collaboration led by Patrick Moore, former Director of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, and Roberto Bedoya, former Executive Director of the National Association of Artists Organizations. Some of the participants' affiliations (as listed on page 4) may have also changed in the interval between the sessions and the publication of this report. The Experience Exchange would not have been possible without the guidance of Randall Bourscheidt, President of the Alliance for the Arts and the original and sustaining force behind the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS.