ABOVE: Two panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt virtually hosted by organizations in Florida. Photos courtesy the National AIDS Memorial.
The AIDS Memorial Quilt is widely considered the largest community arts project in history, constructed by hundreds of thousands of people and weighing 54 tons. But its real weight lies in what each of its more than 50,000, 3-by-6 foot panels represents: lives lost.
Dedicated to more than 100,000 individuals, the Quilt was first conceived in 1985 as a response to the era’s growing AIDS crisis by San Francisco-based LGBTQ activist Cleve Jones. By the year’s end, U.S officials would find an 89% increase in new AIDS cases, with a mortality rate of 51% among diagnosed adults.
“Quilts traditionally were made from cast-offs, taking scraps of fabric that are of different colors and different textures and sewing them into something that is warm and comforting,” Jones has shared. “I thought it would be good therapy for people who were deep in grief … behind all of those horrendous statistics were actual human beings.”
Jones constructed the Quilt’s first panel to memorialize a friend in 1987, joining with a small group of likeminded individuals to formally organize the NAMES Project Foundation to serve as
its caretaker. The group intended to display the Quilt during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in D.C. on Oct. 11, a notion which co-founder Mike Smith says galvanized support nationwide.
The Quilt was larger than a football field by the time of the march and included donated panels from across the country. Six teams of volunteers unfolded 1,920 of them for more than half a million viewers.
A 20-city national tour followed in 1988. Panels from each host city were added along the way, tripling its size to 6,000, and the Quilt returned to D.C. in October for a display in front of the White House with more than 8,000.
Panels were subsequently exhibited in eight countries with support from the World Health Organization to mark the inaugural World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, 1988. Within a few years, the Quilt included panels from every state and more than 25 countries. By the last time it was showcased in its entirety for 1.2 million visitors in 1996, it covered the entire National Mall.
In the decades since, the NAMES Project and the National AIDS Memorial (NAM) – which became the Quilt’s permanent caretaker last year – have worked with partners to arrange more than 1,000 in-person displays each World AIDS Day. Their plans this year changed drastically in response to the coronavirus, another global pandemic, leading organizers to launch a 50-state virtual exhibition Nov. 16.
“World AIDS Day is taking on new meaning this year, as COVID-19 has brought an enormous loss of life and grief to millions of people,” NAM Director John Cunningham shared Oct. 9. “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, the Quilt was a source of immense comfort, inspiration and used as a tool for social activism to open the eyes of the nation … we hope the power and beauty of the Quilt can serve that same purpose for those who are experiencing loss and grief due to COVID-19.”
The first-of-its-kind exhibition is free to the public and runs through March 31, 2021. Organizers advise that while “nothing can replace the beauty of seeing the Quilt in-person, our hope is that this first-ever, 50-state AIDS Memorial Quilt virtual exhibition helps use the power and beauty of the Quilt to help our nation heal and remember during these difficult times.”
The exhibition is curated by state, featuring digital images from thousands of hand-sewn panels. Each tells the story of a loved one lost to AIDS and allows visitors to see “how people came together through one devastating pandemic to create a living memorial as a way to express their love, grief, pain and hope.
View a gallery of historical photos and panels featured in the virtual exhibition below, courtesy of the National AIDS Memorial:
Ahead of World AIDS Day 2020, Watermark spoke with Smith about the Quilt’s latest endeavor. He opened up about loss, legacy and launching a new way to showcase his lifetime commitment to commemorating those lost to AIDS.
WATERMARK: How do you explain the Quilt’s importance to viewers?
Mike Smith: I try to take people back to how bad the world was in the late 1980s. The Quilt really was a response from people all across the country who were grieving during the initial loss of so many lives to AIDS. It became a way for those folks to express their grief, to tell the story of their loved ones and to come together. The Quilt is individual panels made by folks – but it’s the sewing together of it that sort of binds not just the fabric, but the people.
In those early days of HIV and AIDS, when the government wasn’t paying attention, it was a way to break through all that white noise and to be heard. It’s ended up being very colorful and beautiful, but its roots are really as a protest banner. It was about dragging our dead to the March on Washington.
Panels are the size of a grave; that’s how much room those men would have taken up if they’d been able to be there that day. So there’s a bit of anger there in the beginning phase of it and I think we were almost immediately embraced by the rest of the country. Many of the panels came from mothers and families and small towns. I think it sparked a movement that brought AIDS into the mainstream in America.
How did you become involved with the project?
I met Cleve early in the summer of ‘87. A friend introduced us because he thought that I had the organizing skills to help him sort of get this going. But I think the real thing that brought us all together was the March on Washington was going to be that October.
I’ve learned from the Quilt over all these years that humans react to deadlines – and I think that it took a while for the idea to germinate, but with the March coming up it sort of gave a purpose to this. It galvanized people that this was something we could do to make a difference.
So we opened up a little workshop in San Francisco, me and Cleve, and [fellow co-founder] Gert McMullan came to our first volunteer meeting and several other people did. We put a sign in the window and just said, ‘We need bed sheets, we need spray paint, we need thread and scissors and sewing machines. Please help us.”
Literally, that was a Friday night – and on Saturday morning, there was a line down Market Street of people holding fabric, boxes and sewing machines to get us going. It just really touched a nerve quickly. In no time at all people had embraced it and we were hearing about similar things happening in Boys Town in Chicago, in Greenwich Village, in West Hollywood. It sort of caught people’s imagination and spontaneously, people started making panels and sending them to us.
What were the next steps?
About a month before the March, we put out a flyer to grief counselors across the country, just explaining what we were doing. We didn’t think much of it but then about a month before that first display, we had 800 pieces of overnight mail. Mostly from mothers who were isolated in their small towns and unable to tell even their church group what their son had died of.
They were reaching out to a bunch of gay men in San Francisco. I mean, how desperate they had to be. It really for us was the spark that helped us to see that this wasn’t just a gay men’s sewing circle and that we really had something powerful here.
How did it feel to connect with grieving communities outside of your own?
It really made all the difference in the world. I think for many of us these were really desperate times. You could walk down Castro Street and you could see people you’ve known for years, looking like hell, and you’d nod and smile and say “hello.” And they’d go past and you’d think “I’m never going to see that person again.”
And the country wasn’t reacting; this was very early in the epidemic. Nobody really seemed to care and I think a lot of us were convinced that we were going to die in our little gay neighborhood.
We were just going to die. Nobody was going to know or care. It meant the world to us when those mothers started sending their panels.
What was it like to see the Quilt at the National Mall?
Well, during the March in Washington, we had to fight the Reagan Administration for months just to get permits. They really didn’t want a bunch of dead gay men laid out near the White House, for obvious reasons in the Reagan administration.
But for those first displays, that one and the two after that were very close to the White House, there’s just something magical about unfolding the Quilt at dawn. We would be out there all night the night before getting it prepared, and then the unfolding ceremony would start at dawn. There was just something so powerful about the space. You know, this is America’s front yard. This is this is where you go to address your country and have your grievances redressed, and it felt momentous to be there.
How did the crowd react?
During the March on Washington, you expect a rowdy crowd. And it was a rowdy crowd with lots of signs and everything else – but you came up on the edge of the Quilt and this silence fell over the place. It was just sort of sacred ground. There was this reverence and silence that was just amazing to watch, especially given the rambunctiousness of the people coming through.
What was it like seeing the Quilt continue to grow?
The last big display of the Quilt in Washington was in 1996 and by that time, it was 40,000 panels. We started at the steps of the Capitol and it went all the way down the Mall and up to the entrance of the Washington Monument and all the way along the sides into the trees by the museums.
The scale of that spoke volumes, it was such an overwhelming size and scope. If you were out in the middle of that you really felt like you were literally in the middle of AIDS and couldn’t escape it.
It was a beautiful thing to see but it was really kind of off-putting experience.
Are there any particular Quilt interactions that resonate with you?
I was kind of the “business brains” and so in those early years I tried not have a lot of interaction because emotionally it would shut me down and I had work to do. (Laughs.) The stories that most resonate with me are watching a mother turn her panel into us to be sewn to the Quilt. There’s this sort of dance that I’ve seen hundreds of times, where someone will come into the workshop clutching an envelope with some fabric in it to their chest, wary and guarded.
You can see them sort of gradually loosen up and eventually the package gets set on the table and when they really feel that they trust you, they slide it across the table. It’s just always so powerful to see and to know what they’re going through. Those are the things that always caught me the most.
How does it feel knowing the Quilt has traveled the world?
I’m still sometimes amazed at that the scope of what this became, starting out with a few people sitting around on the floor in an empty showroom space in a retail store that we just rented.
We were thinking, “well, we’ll do this until the March on Washington, and then we’ve all got to go back to our lives and get jobs.” We didn’t understand how it would resonate and how the ownership of it would transition from us to all of these people who feel that the Quilt is really theirs, because they have a loved one on it.
I think about how a panel that I made for my dear friend, Jeff has traveled the world. Literally. I mean that section went to Cuba; that section went to South Africa. It’s remarkable. For World AIDS Day, every year for 30 years now we’ve done hundreds and hundreds of displays in all sorts of places.
How was the decision made to mark it virtually this year?
There was a time in August where we thought, “Do we want to be creating opportunities for people to gather for World AIDS Day, and are we guilty of encouraging the spread of COVID-19 if something went wrong at one of these displays?” We thought, “do we do we want to be part of the problem?” And we didn’t.
We decided we were not going to do any displays and that kind of rocked the room. I’ve been around forever, but even some of the other staff have been there 15, 18 years and the thought of declining a Quilt display, first of all, was just horrifying.
But the thought that all of the Quilt would still be on the shelf for World AIDS Day, it was impossible to think of. So we started thinking, “Is there still a way that that people who want to see particular panels can see them?” and it sort of morphed over the course of a few days into asking people if they wanted to host their own virtual display.
What was the response?
It resonated with a lot of people. We had an almost immediate response by 10 or 15 organizations who said they would gladly convert their real display into a virtual display.
Then we started having people say, “we’ve never had the Quilt in our in our agency for World AIDS Day, but this virtual display is easy and we’d love to do it.” You can browse through the Quilt and zoom right in on your state or your city and see panels that someone there has decided to do a virtual display with – and it’s fascinating to me that it’s working.
How are the panels chosen?
In each case we’re working with an agency, an organization or someone who wants to be the official host of that display. We’re working with them to choose the blocks of Quilt that they want and there are several organizations in Florida that are participating.
That’s the magic of the web. We can get literally millions of visitors to something that we never could have done in real life, provided there’s enough momentum for it. This display could be seen by more people than any of the real ones. Remarkably, it makes it accessible on a whole new level.
How does it feel to present this during COVID-19?
For a lot of us who live through the first pandemic, we’re a little angry that we’ve had to have two in our lifetimes – and I’ve talked to even older folks who as children remember in the 50s, the fear of Polio. There are a lot of similarities, but there are a lot of differences, too – I think I can’t draw this with too broadly of a stroke.
It kind of feels like it did inside the gay community then: “Am I next?” It focuses your mind and gets you thinking about living your life for today, which has been my motto my whole life because of my early experiences in my 20s.
We also have a government that seems to have dropped the ball, which is also very similar to the old days … There are a lot of same emotions there. I think we’ve found a responsible way to keep getting the Quilt out and telling our story in this time. Otherwise I don’t think we would have moved quite this quickly into the digital world; COVID has probably moved our organization along by a decade. This is a really good way to tell the stories and to keep those memories alive, and to be impactful in a different way.
Will virtual displays continue in the future?
It’s been exciting for us to see this taking off and it has helped us figure out new ways to continue to be relevant in the modern world. This may trigger us into continuing to do these kind of virtual displays at other times of the year.
We’re also thinking that if there’s a lot of interest in this, when we are able to display the Quilt again it may spark interest in doing a real display. The virtual and the real displays can co-exist.
World AIDS Day is Dec. 1. View the 50-State AIDS Memorial Quilt virtual exhibition now through March 31 at AIDSMemorial.org/Virtual-Exhibition.
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