AIDS Memorial Quilt Research Articles

The AIDS Memorial Quilt as Radical Public History

Radical public history relies on reflective practices that include formal and experientially acquired knowledge within a broad interdisciplinary framework. Using material culture methodologies from history and anthropology, we present the AIDS Memorial Quilt as an example of radical public history in action. We recount the history and meaning of the Quilt and share quantitative survey information based on college students’ responses to six Quilt blocks displayed with supplemental informational banners. Embracing a core pillar of radical public history—shared authority—our authors include interdisciplinary academic and non-academic community partners whose combined skills, lived experiences, and expertise are critical to this movement and this paper. We finish with insights for those wishing to host Quilt blocks in their community.

LGBTQ+ themed public art: promoting an expanded view on genders and advancing gender education

This essay explores the transformative role of LGBTQ+ themed public art in promoting an expanded view of genders and advancing gender education. By engaging with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, I want to stress how public art both serves as a medium for aesthetic expression and also acts as a crucial participant in the performative act of gender identity construction. From the vibrant defiance of rainbow crosswalks to the poignant narratives of the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the impactful murals by Keith Haring, LGBTQ+ themed public art challenges traditional gender roles and identities, offering alternative visions that resist binary classifications. These public artworks create inclusive spaces that foster community engagement, historical commemoration, and activism, effectively enhancing public pedagogy in gender education. By embedding diverse and non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality in public consciousness, such art prompts a reevaluation of societal norms, thereby contributing to a broader understanding and acceptance of gender diversity. This essay emphasizes the potential of LGBTQ+ -themed public art to serve as a dynamic medium for communicative pedagogy, manifesting its significance in shaping social consciousness and advancing the cause of gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights.

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

“If You Are Reading It, I am Dead”

This article uses oral history interviews with the family and friends of Duane Puryear to document the history of one of the most frequently displayed panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The approaching fortieth anniversary of the Quilt and its recent acquisition by the National AIDS Memorial warrant a reexamination of how we engage with the Quilt as archive. Puryear’s panel demonstrates how we might use this enormous community art project to excavate local histories of activism in response to HIV and AIDS; it also challenges reductive political histories of the Quilt that view it as in binary opposition to histories of direct-action groups like ACT UP.

Memorialising COVID-19

Memorialising COVID-19

Mourning and memorializing in the COVID-19 era

ABSTRACT This short essay engages the efforts of artists, activists, and mourners to memorialize those who have died during the COVID-19 pandemic. These commemorative sites provide needed correctives to the physical absences, political opportunism, and statistical abstractions that have tended to personify the pandemic. As with the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the tropes of individualism and tactility materialize frequently in conversations about these displays. Despite the generative impulses of these memorials, it is imperative that these creations move beyond performative gestures of sentimentality to ensure that the civic agony inflicted by anti-science and far-right movements is not repeated.

When does an epidemic become a ‘crisis’? Analogies between Covid-19 and HIV/AIDS in American public memory

This article critically interrogates historical analogies made between the Covid-19 pandemic and HIV/AIDS epidemic in American public discourse, highlighting the role of cultural memory and normative frameworks of ‘crisis’ and its temporalities in shaping collective responses. It situates the Covid-19 pandemic in a multidirectional mnemonic frame by analysing borrowings from other usable pasts, particularly the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States, which in turn drew upon memory of the Holocaust. A reading of Susan Sontag’s ‘The Way We Live Now’ affirms the value of multidirectional cultural borrowing while also revealing its limits. Notably, the ever-growing AIDS Memorial Quilt may serve as a model for memorializing victims of Covid-19. While analogies between pandemics may be comforting or mobilizing, their meaning must remain open to contestation and also preserve particularities and differences. The history of HIV/AIDS centres the question, ‘crisis for whom?’ and cautions against prematurely declaring the ‘end’ of the Covid-19 pandemic.

‘Meeting beneath faraway rivers:’ examining the impact of graphic medicine through the aids memorial quilt and 7 Miles a Second

ABSTRACT This essay re-examines the often undervalued role that the American graphic novel played for members within the LBGT community during the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Particular focus is placed on the way in which graphic novelists responded to socially conservative leaders who seized medical language to pathologize homosexuality for the purpose of expediting the passage of regressive legislation. Both David Wojnarowicz’s 7 Miles a Second and the interconnected panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt addressed this process of systematic dehumanisation and sought to redeem a nation that was otherwise unwilling to confront the magnitude of what it had lost.

Co-existence and collaboration: Australian AIDS quilts in public museums and community collections

The Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt is arguably the most recognizable artefact of the AIDS Crisis in Australia. Consisting of over 800 panels, most of the quilt is now divided between a public museum (Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney) and a community organization (AIDS Memorial Candlelight Vigil & Quilt Project, Melbourne). This paper compares the accessibility and meaning of the quilt depending on its location. In doing so, it argues that neither is a ‘better’ custodian for these objects as their differences are also the source of their unique contribution to the care and interpretation of the quilts. The tensions that exist between museums and LGBTIQ communities were exposed when the proper residence of one of the panels was disputed. I use this case to suggest that equitable collaboration can only occur if museums take more cues from communities.

Stitching the Future of the AIDS Quilt: The Cultural Work of Digital Memorials

In light of a widening generational disconnect and the increasing fragility of the textile artifact itself, the cultural legacy of the AIDS Memorial Quilt is under threat. This article describes the collaborative creation of digital experiences that aim to augment and revitalize the AIDS Memorial Quilt as an artwork of continued social, cultural, and political significance. By discussing the past, present, and future of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, this article contextualizes the Quilt's technological journey, including the efforts to create digital datasets of images and metadata. This discussion will illuminate an important emergent area of design research in the digital humanities: the creation of cultural technologies for the purposes of digital memorialization.

Random Sample

Computer researchers are helping viewers take in the world's largest piece of community folk art, the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg has been printing three-dimensional masks, or approximations, of people's faces based on DNA sequenced from their hair. And this week's numbers quantify two grants to treat HIV and malaria and tonnes of global emissions of carbon dioxide in 2011.

Absent Bodies: The AIDS Memorial Quilt as Social Melancholia

AbstractFar from being apolitical, self-indulgent or ineffective, as was suggested by some in the activist community, the NAMES Project Quilt became a symbol of the decimation of AIDS and a beacon for those in the AIDS-affected community, and challenged and transformed public attitudes towards people with AIDS. The NAMES Project Quilt risked sanitizing and homogenizing the particularities of the deceased, but I shall argue that the spectacle of the quilt changed public opinion through its mechanisms of publicity and meaning-making. Building on Michael Warner's notion of the ‘Mass Subject’, the quilt, I will suggest, transformed the mainstream, effectively forcing the formerly abject AIDS-affected community into public consciousness through the mechanisms of mass media.

Rites of belonging: Grief, memorial and social action

Since the first panels of the Australian AIDS Memorial Quilt were officially launched in Sydney in 1988, it has become a widely recognised memorial to people who have died from AIDS. This paper discusses how AIDS Memorials, namely the AIDS Quilt and the annual Candlelight Vigils, have challenged the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS through creating public space for the expression of grief. The paper draws on the idea of ‘social movement frames’, demonstrating how, through the use of symbolic actions and ritualised performance, the political and ideological beliefs of the AIDS movement were expressed not only through articulated argument or attempt at rational persuasion, but through the demonstration of alternative cultural practice.

The Contours of Loss

OF LOSS Naomi Mandel In Lost Bodies, Laura Tanner exam ines the philosophical, epistemo logical, and conceptual challenges that personal loss poses to prevail ing discourses of grief. Taking as its focus photographic images, lit erary and nonliterary texts, and commemorative objects like the AIDS Memorial Quilt, Lost Bodies explores how cultural constructions of death and grief are inextricably bound with specific assumptions about the (4). What, asks Tanner, can the lost body—the wasting body of the terminally ill, the absent body of the deceased— tell us about our own bodies and

The AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Contemporary Culture of Public Commemoration

This essay situates the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt within the vigorous culture of national commemorative building in the late twentieth-century United States, a culture that found its first articulation in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We begin with an assessment of ways in which the AIDS Memorial Quilt appropriated and extended the rhetoric of the VVM in terms of the two memorials' modes of democratic representation, their troubling of the boundaries between contexts of invention and reception, and their differential coding of the public and private. We take up later memorial projects, specifically the Oklahoma City National Memorial and the September 11, 2001, commemorative projects, to suggest how the rhetoric of the AIDS Quilt can be marked as a harbinger of practices to come and how its progressive rhetoric has been turned in some later commemorative works to very different ends.

The Politics of Loss and Its Remains in Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt

Using Judith Butler's notion of the "ungrievable life," this project examines the politics of loss and its remains in Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, an award-winning documentary featuring five diverse lives, represented by panels in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and their subsequent loss. The essay is divided into four sections. The first discusses the notion of loss and its remains. The second provides a brief overview of the film and situates it in the political and historical context in which it was produced and circulated. Using the concepts of bodily, spatial, and ideal remains, the third section analyzes the politics of loss in the film. The essay concludes by examining these politics two decades after the AIDS Memorial Quilt was originally displayed.

Q.U.I.L.T.: A Patchwork of Reflections

This essay, through an interrelated patchwork of "thought panels," explores the themes of visuality, representation, and trauma in the AIDS Memorial Quilt. We argue that as a text visually representing the magnitude of the global AIDS crisis, the Quilt fails miserably. However, this failure to represent is precisely why the Quilt succeeds as a gathering point for AIDS awareness and compassion, where traditional memorials might not. Indeed, to understand the rhetorical function of the Quilt, we argue that the Quilt must not be conceived as a "monument" to the crisis, but as an "archive." Whereas a monument enshrines an event in a particular place and time, an archive records and makes accessible a (partial, contingent) history, a history that is more than the sum of the parts on its timeline.

Self-Transcendence and Depression Among AIDS Memorial Quilt Panel Makers

Self-transcendence is a process that can help individuals reestablish well-being after experiencing a significant, life-altering event. In this study, we sought to identify the relationship between self-transcendence and depression in individuals who lost loved ones to HIV/AIDS and to describe and compare self-transcendence, self-transcendence variables of acceptance and spirituality, and depression among bereaved individuals who created AIDS Memorial Quilt panels with those who did not. The findings support Reed's self-transcendence theory, with inverse correlations between self-transcendence and depression obtained from both the total group and the panel makers. Significant differences were also found between certain self-transcendence variables and depression among the study participants related to gender and ethnicity. In addition, thematic analysis of panel maker interviews revealed five themes: Quilt panel making provides validation, Quilt panel making creates a living memory, liberating acceptance of loss, community of survivors, and connection to a higher power. These findings assist in understanding the complexities of the grief process and support the usefulness of Quilt panel making as an intervention for coping with grief related to HIV/AIDS.

The AIDS Memorial Quilt

THE AIDS MEMORIAL QUILT was conceived in November 1985 by San Francisco, Calif, gay activist Cleve Jones. Jones had helped organize the annual march honoring Mayor George Moscone and gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, who were assassinated in 1978. When planning the march, Jones learned that more than 1000 San Franciscans had died of AIDS, and he asked the marchers to write on their placards the names of friends, partners, and family members who had died of the disease. After the march, the marchers taped their placards onto the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building. The wall of names looked like a patchwork quilt.1 Jones and his fellow activists gathered in a San Francisco storefront to plan a more permanent memorial to those who had died of AIDS and to publicize the devastating impact of the disease. They created the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Generous donors supplied sewing machines and materials, and volunteers over the years have created more than 46000 individual 3- by 6-foot memorial panels, most of them honoring one particular person who died of AIDS. Some 35 countries, from Argentina to Japan to Uganda, have contributed panels. The quilt was displayed for the first time on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on October 11, 1987, during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. In 1988, the quilt went on a national tour during which it was displayed in 20 cities. This tour raised $500 000 for AIDS service organizations. The quilt would return to Washington in 1988, 1989, 1992, and 1996. Each time it returned, the quilt had grown larger. Every panel is different, and the panels feature a multitude of materials: feather boas, lace, leather, love letters, cowboy boots, buttons and bows, paintings, photographs, fishnet, and fur are but a few of the materials used and objects attached. Each display of the quilt features celebrities, politicians, and family members, friends, and lovers reading aloud the names of the people for whom the quilt panels were made. The largest community art project in the world, the AIDS Memorial Quilt was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. In the last 20 years, the quilt has been viewed by more than 15 million people and has raised more than $3 million for AIDS service organizations. The AIDS Memorial Quilt is an overwhelming sight, both a joyful remembrance and a reminder of the tragedy of lives lost. It is a beautiful broad expanse of color and feeling, each panel made with love for the person being honored and celebrated. The quilt is a powerful statement; its image serves as a memorial to all the people and their loved ones whose lives have been transformed by this epidemic over the past 25 years.

A Very American Epidemic: Memory Politics and Identity Politics in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, 1985–1993

During a gay protest march in San Francisco in November 1985, local activist Cleve Jones asked participants to carry placards bearing the names of people they knew who had died of AIDS. Protesters then posted the names on a wall of the San Francisco Federal Building, and in surveying them, Jones says he was reminded of a quilt. Soon thereafter, in grief over the death of a friend, Jones made the first panel of what was to become the AIDS Memorial Quilt, whose 44,000 panels now bear witness to the memories of some of the 448,000 people in the United States who have already died of AIDS.1 But in 1988, just three years after the AIDS Memorial Quilt was born at a political demonstration, Cleve Jones, then acting as the Executive Director of the Names Project Foundation, told reporters that “we’re completely non-political; we have no political message at all.” Jones’s attempt to distance the Names Project from politics reveals the complexities of political culture and political activism in the 1980s, and it encourages us to examine memory politics, cultural politics, and identity politics together with the issue-oriented, interest-group activism that is often assumed to encompass the full definition of politics. What kind of politics did the AIDS Quilt envision in its design, and what kind of politics did it embody in its practices?2