AIDS Memorial Quilt is an enormous work of textile art consisting of thousands of individually designed panels, each memorializing a person or persons who have died of complications due to AIDS. AIDS is the final, life-threatening stage of infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The idea for the quilt originated in 1985, and the first panels were created in 1987. Since then, it has become a powerful symbol of society’s struggles with, responses to, and attitudes toward the deadly pandemic (global occurrence) of AIDS. Millions of people have died of AIDS since the disease was first identified in 1981.
The American social activist Cleve Jones conceived the AIDS Memorial Quilt in 1985. The idea began at an annual candlelight march commemorating the 1978 assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Milk was the first openly gay person elected to government in California, and Jones, one of the march organizers, had served on his staff. At the 1985 march, Jones and his friend, Joseph Durant, handed out poster boards, asking people to write on them the names of friends and loved ones who had died of AIDS and to carry them in the march. When the marchers reached San Francisco’s Old Federal Building, Jones and other march organizers covered the entire face of the building with the memorial posters. Confronted with the patchwork memorial, Jones thought that it looked like a quilt. At that moment, he realized that a quilt could serve not only as a much needed permanent memorial but also as a tool for advocacy, helping to illustrate the humanity behind the disease’s statistics.
In 1987, Jones created the first 3 foot by 6 foot (1 meter by 2 meter) fabric panel in honor of his friend Marvin Feldman, who had died of AIDS. Soon, a group of people gathered with Jones to honor the lives of their friends and loved ones and together completed the first 40 memorial panels. The group also founded the NAMES Project Foundation, the organization responsible for the preservation, display, and care of the quilt. The quilt quickly grew to over 1,900 panels, and in October 1987 was displayed at Washington, D.C.’s National Mall. It became a powerful symbol of a new era of support for people with AIDS.
The AIDS Memorial Quilt is the largest community art project in the world. The quilt is also a landmark piece of collaborative (cooperative) art, with panels contributed by thousands of individuals. By 2015, the quilt measured more than 1.3 million square feet (120,000 square meters) and weighed over 54 tons (49 metric tons). It had reached over 48,000 individual fabric panels, most of them bearing one or more names. It thus commemorated the lives of more than 94,000 people.
The NAMES Project Foundation houses the quilt in Atlanta. The foundation continuously displays portions of the quilt throughout the United States each year.
