The renovation, largely completed, features a first-floor chapel with a 14-panel oil-on-canvas mural by Eric Karpeles, a painter who created The Sanctuary Project, a traveling AIDS memorial.
She is also advocating for the creation of an AIDS memorial in West Hollywood.
Average has also been selected to judge submissions for Vancouver's AIDS memorial and anti-homophobia posters.
His first symphony, a 1990 AIDS memorial, is on a Grammy-winning BMG recording under Leonard Slatkin, along with "Of Rage and Remembrance," Mr. Corigliano's AIDS cantata.
"They call me the green dean," he said proudly, mentioning the blue crab living in a cathedral tank, a few steps from an AIDS memorial.
While there are AIDS memorials, exhibits, and artwork in the United States, the AIDS Museum in Newark will be the first institution of its kind in the country.
The cathedral has been home to a peacock, a tightrope walker in residence and a blue crab in a tank near an AIDS memorial.
For his master's thesis at the University of Minnesota, he designed a traveling AIDS memorial that could go from city to city by truck.
The Names Project Quilt - the national AIDS memorial, which weighs about 3 1/2 tons and is the size of two football fields - contains more than 3,000 individual panels, each depicting the name of someone who has died of acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
The masquerade, which capped a day in which museums, art galleries and other cultural organizations around the world staged AIDS memorials, raised an estimated $2.8 million for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (Amfar).