Gordon Kurtti Project - NYTimes.com 253 East Houston Street, Lower East Side Through Sunday Some artists are important for their story rather than for their art, and this seems to be true of Gordon Kurtti, who died of complications from AIDS in 1987 at 26. Born in Yonkers, he was a gifted art student with interest in illustration when he landed in the East Village in the 1980s, plunging into the fringier depths of its cross-disciplinary subcultures. He performed with contemporaries like Edgar Oliver, Lypsinka (John Epperson), Tabboo! (Stephen Tashjian), Samoa Moriki, and with his classmate Kembra Pfahler. In 1984, at ABC No Rio, a funky alternative space, Mr. Kurtti and Ms. Pfahler organized an influential art exhibition called "The Extremist Show," a kind of performance Olympics that ran for nine days, often around the clock. By then Mr. Kurtti had become affiliated with Allied Productions, a nonprofit founded by ABC No Rio's directors, Peter Cramer and Jack Waters, along with Carl George, who organized the Participant Inc. show. Under Allied Production's auspices, Mr. Kurtti experimented with film, taught art in Lower East Side schools and continued to produce drawings, varied in subject and style, but primarily Aubrey-Beardsley-meets-Al-Hirschfeld portrait cartoons of local club royalty (Lady Bunny, Hapi Phace) and in-the-news stars (Prince, Diana Ross, Desmond Tutu). Mr. Kurtti's graphic skills were impressive; there's no telling where, with concentration, he might have taken them, and presumably there's film work still to be seen. But he died too soon to leave a substantial visual legacy. What he did leave was a set of ardent friends and a history of having shaped something important that barely seems to exist in New York anymore: a hand-to-mouth, multiethnic, multigender, socially activist, normality-aversive underground culture. He's worth remembering for being part of that.