A name for every life
While the government stayed quiet, ordinary people took needles and fabric and made the epidemic visible. Each panel of the AIDS Memorial Quilt remembers one person who died of AIDS, made by someone who loved them. Angels in America and the Quilt came out of the same years and the same refusal to let the dead be forgotten.
The largest community art project in the world
Names on a wall
In November 1985, San Francisco activist Cleve Jones joined a candlelight march. By then more than 1,000 people in San Francisco had died of AIDS. Marchers wrote the names of friends and lovers on placards and taped them to the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building. Jones looked at the patchwork of names and thought it looked like a quilt.
About a year later, a small group met in a San Francisco storefront to turn that idea into something real. Jones made the first panel, for his friend Marvin Feldman. In June 1987, Jones, Mike Smith, Gert McMullin and others formally founded the NAMES Project Foundation. Panels began arriving from Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles, and volunteers sewed them together on donated machines.
Why a quilt?
Many people who died of AIDS in the 1980s were refused funerals, rejected by their families, or buried without their partners being acknowledged. Some funeral homes would not take their bodies at all. A quilt panel gave every person a public memorial that no one could take away, made by the people who actually knew them. It also turned a statistic into thousands of individual faces, jokes, clothes, photographs and handwriting.
The reading of the names
At the first display, volunteers unfolded the panels at sunrise while the name of every person in the Quilt was read aloud. That ritual continues at nearly every display today. Hearing the names, one after another, is how many visitors first understand the scale of the loss.
Connections to the play
- The Quilt was first shown on October 11, 1987, less than two years after the main action of Angels in America ends.
- Like Prior, many people with AIDS spent these years watching friends die while the people in power looked away.
- The play ends with Prior blessing the audience: “More Life.” The Quilt makes a similar demand, that the dead be counted and the living keep going.
The Quilt over the years
- October 11, 1987
First display, on the National Mall during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. 1,920 panels covered an area larger than a football field. Half a million people came to see it that weekend.
- 1988
A four-month, 20-city national tour raised nearly $500,000 for AIDS service organizations. Local panels added along the way tripled its size to more than 6,000. In October it returned to Washington with 8,288 panels.
- December 1, 1988
The first World AIDS Day, marked with Quilt displays in eight countries.
- 1989
Cleve Jones, Mike Smith and the NAMES Project were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. That October more than 12,000 panels were shown in Washington.
- October 1992
The whole Quilt returned to the National Mall, now with panels from every U.S. state and 28 countries.
- October 1996
The last time the entire Quilt was displayed at once. It covered the National Mall and drew an estimated 1.2 million visitors, including President Clinton, the first sitting president to see it.
- 2012
For the NAMES Project’s 25th anniversary, the Quilt was too big to show at once, so 1,500 blocks were displayed each day over two weeks in Washington.
- 2019–2020
The National AIDS Memorial in San Francisco became the Quilt’s permanent home. Its archive of about 200,000 letters, photographs and documents went to the Library of Congress.
- Today
Sections of the Quilt are shown more than 1,000 times a year in schools, universities, places of worship and community centers, and new panels are still being made.
How a panel is made
- Start with a 3 × 6 foot piece of sturdy, non-stretch fabric, leaving about half an inch at the edges for sewing.
- Decorate it with fabric paint, permanent marker, appliqué or stencils. Photos can be printed on iron-on transfers or sewn on in clear vinyl pouches.
- Write a letter about the person: who they were to you and how they would want to be remembered.
- Send the panel and letter to the National AIDS Memorial, or bring it to a local Quilt display.
Full instructions: aidsmemorial.org/make-a-panel
See it for yourself
Every panel has been photographed and can be searched by name online. Try searching for a name, or simply browse and read the panels.
Search the AIDS Memorial Quilt →
Questions to talk about after the show
- Why might a quilt, something made by hand at home, be a powerful way to protest?
- Who in the play gets remembered, and who is forgotten? Who does the remembering?
- If you made a panel for someone in your own life, what would you put on it?
Source: National AIDS Memorial, Quilt History and Make a Panel. Used with permission.