AIDS quilt honors 25 years of lives lost
What began in 1987 as a memorial to 40 victims is today a work of art honoring more than 93,000
Memorial Quilt, with names of more than 93,000 people, will be displayed in its entirety in Washington, D.C.,
It was on June 27, 1987, when a group of grieving friends and loved ones hung a 40-panel quilt from a balcony in San Francisco to memorialize 40 lives lost to AIDS. Their act inspired thousands to make and send in their own panels and, soon, that quilt became the world’s biggest piece of folk art and the nation’s most tangible symbol of the epidemic.
Today, the AIDS Memorial Quilt contains more than 47,000 panels with the names of more than 93,000 people. Laid end to end, they would stretch more than 50 miles. Displaying the whole thing is such a huge undertaking that it hasn’t been tried since 1996.
But it’s about to be done, in a series of events that begins Wednesday, the 25th anniversary of that first display.
The entire quilt is coming back to Washington, D.C. Pieces will be on display during the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, from Wednesday until July 1 and July 4-8. Then, from July 21 to July 25, organizers hope to roll out every segment of the 54-ton quilt, in stages, on the National Mall and in more than 50 venues around the city, during the International AIDS Conference.
At a time when AIDS doesn’t make daily headlines and when treatments make long lives possible for many with the disease, the quilt is a reminder that people with HIV still matter and that the disease still kills, says Julie Rhoad, president of the Names Project Foundation, the Atlanta-based custodian of the quilt: “Those who have no access to care are dying rapid, hard deaths, and they are invisible.”
Families and friends who sewed names, photos and mementos into the grave-size, 3-foot-by-6foot rectangles still grieve and still hope to inspire action against the epidemic, she says.
And while the message is the same, some things have changed. Even as the physical blocks of fabric are laid out, visitors to the Smithsonian festival also will be invited to explore the quilt through three digital tools:
-A 4-foot-long table with an interactive touchscreen where users can search for photos of the panels by name.
-A 50-inch wall screen with an interactive timeline of the quilt and the AIDS epidemic.
-A mobile app for www.aidsquilttouch.org, a website where visitors can search, view, and comment upon photos of the panels.
Then, during the AIDS conference, visitors can use the app to find the physical location of panels on display, says Anne Balsamo, a professor of interactive media and communication at the University of Southern California. She is coordinating the digital project, developed at several universities and Microsoft.
“The quilt is a very important, but very fragile memorial,” Balsamo says. The digital tools make it accessible to a larger audience, even as the Names Project continues to maintain, show and grow it.
Maintaining the quilt — formally named a national treasure in 2005 and still growing by about one panel per day — is a constant job for a small staff at the Atlanta headquarters, where the quilt is stored and portions are shipped out for smaller events each year, Rhoad says.
The Washington trip is a monumental undertaking: Operations manager Roddy Williams says he packed two 53-foot trucks and one 26foot truck and will begin training the first of thousands of volunteers Saturday.
On one truck: a panel Williams made a few months ago for Andrew Lowery, a friend from Atlanta who died in 2006. Also packed: a panel made in the mid-1990s for Patrick Leo Herndon, a Texas social worker who died of AIDS in 1988, at age 41.
Herndon’s sister, Cindi Love, 57, of Abilene, Texas, will travel to Washington to see it. “I will be reconnected with him again and that is precious to me,” says Love, who also has a son with HIV.
She hopes Patrick’s panel and all the others send a message: “I believe that if we don’t memorialize the people we lost, we may forget to continue to fight.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1.2 million people in the USA are living with HIV and that more than 600,000 have died from AIDS.
For more on the Names Project and the quilt’s Washington display, visit Quilt2012.org.