Fabric of Life: The enduring legacy of the AIDS Memorial Quilt

This article first featured in the November/December 2020 issue of Crafts. Some words have been amended.

It took Helen Johnson 15 years after the death of her son to feel ready to craft a tribute to him. She gathered photographs of Peter, along with mementos from his life – a teddy bear, a red knit hat that became his signature – and sewed them onto his favourite green-and-white striped bedsheet. With her hands, she tried to distil his life onto a 183 x 91cm stretch of fabric. Peter had died at the age of 30 in another global pandemic, the AIDS virus, in 1993. In creating this deeply personal tableau, Johnson was memorialising her son and expressing her grief – and adding to the largest community folk art project in the world. Today, the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt has over 50,000 panels, which commemorate over 100,000 people who have died from the illness, and it has been photographed and fully digitised for the first time this year.

For Johnson, like so many of the contributors, it was an act of remembering and catharsis: an individual expression of loss, but also a collective one. At a time when people across the world are dealing with the pain of losing loved ones to covid-19, the quilt’s story has a renewed relevance. Its founder, Cleve Jones, himself draws a direct comparison between how the two pandemics have affected marginalised communities and those deemed expendable, from the impact of AIDS on LGBTQ+ people and people of colour to that of covid-19 on BAME groups and the older generation today. Says Jones: ‘Sadly, then as now, too many people not immediately affected by the disease felt they had no stake in the fight against it. They believed it only happened to other people.’

The AIDS Memorial Quilt (as it is commonly abbreviated) drew upon an American tradition of quilting as a political activity, wielded during events such as the Civil War and the Second World War, as well as a folk art accessible to historically excluded people, such as the Black women quilters of Gee’s Bend. Quilting has long been used by those on the margins to take up space, express anger and demand change.

[2020] marked the quilt’s homecoming to San Francisco, where the first panels were made. It joins the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park, and would have been displayed larger than ever before in San Francisco if covid-19 hadn’t thwarted plans. Its associated archives – including records of the makers and the memorialised, personal items and letters – are now in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. After 35 years, this folk-art community project is now officially part of the nation’s history.

The story of its beginnings has taken on an almost legendary quality today: layers of loss sewn together in 1980s San Francisco. In 1978 Harvey Milk, the first gay elected official in California, and city mayor George Moscone were assassinated. Every year after, Milk mentee Cleve Jones and other activists organised a march in their honour. During the 1985 march, Jones heard that the AIDS death toll had reached 1,000 in the Castro, their small and vibrant gay neighbourhood. Famously, thousands died before Reagan even mentioned AIDS in public, and government inaction and the politicisation of AIDS were undoubtedly contributing factors in the terrible toll of the illness – a story that feels all too familiar today. Jones asked his fellow marchers to write the names of those lost on placards, which they taped to the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building. As he looked out at the sea of names, they reminded him of a patchwork quilt – and so the idea for the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt was born.

Jones made the first panel to commemorate his friend Marvin Feldman in February 1987. The early panels were not elaborate and mostly created by spray-painting names onto bedsheets, but as word of the project spread, the contributions became increasingly creative and varied. Jones was joined by fellow activists Gert McMullin and Mike Smith, who were motivated by their own anger and desperation after losing loved ones. The duo needed a way to ‘reach out to people so that they see this as part of their problem, part of a nation’s problem’. With the help of a team of volunteers, they set up a workshop.

People in mourning would come to them, often without any sewing ability, and they would listen to their stories, then help them to create panels. They recognised that having a space and outlet for grief was important, as was the way someone specifically chose to memorialise their loved ones. Smith says each panel captures a life, as well as a relationship. McMullin, today dubbed ‘the Mother of the AIDS Quilt’, tells me that most of the first panels were made by gay men, for gay men. Once the quilt became front page news, and people became aware of it outside the sanctuaries of urban gay neighbourhoods like the Castro and Chicago’s Boystown, mothers and fathers began to make panels for their sons. Because of the stigma of the illness at the time, many families did not publicly discuss their losses. With the normal grieving process interrupted, the difficulty of processing death and the sense of isolation became profound. In choosing the quintessentially American folk art of quilting, Jones had chosen something ‘warm and comforting’, a symbol of cosy domesticity to subvert how the media and public perceived gay people as dangerous. The word ‘quilt’ spoke to him of ‘castoffs, discarded remnants, different colours and textures, sewn together to create something beautiful, useful and warm’. He thought it would be good therapy for people deep in grief, and a helpful tool to bring the media’s attention to the cause. He was right.

By October of 1987 there were 1,920 panels. They went on display at the National Mall, a park in Washington DC, home to the Lincoln Memorial and national museums. Iconic photos taken at the time show them stretching out into the distance, revealing, as Jones had hoped, both the scale of the loss and the individual humanity of each irreplaceable life. The National Mall is ‘a place that’s known for its monuments; they’re made of stone and steel,’ he said. ‘We took a monument there that was made of cloth and thread, and sewn by ordinary Americans. It was an extraordinary testament to what we went through’.

Panels are made using traditional techniques and materials, such as cotton embroidery and appliqué, but also glitter, bubble wrap and the last of people’s medication. There is the universal language of love and loss, and there is affectionate humour and in-jokes in messages. There are famous names on the quilt, including gay icons like Freddie Mercury and artists such as Keith Haring, who was memorialised through multiple panels that replicate his distinctive blocky graffiti and pop art in bright primary colours. But above all there are thousands of ordinary people, children and adults, LGBTQ+ and straight, from all manner of backgrounds, their stories woven together.

The making of a quilt panel brought comfort to those left behind – and in some cases, to those who were dying. A young man named Duane Kearns Puryear made his own panel before he died, writing out his name and story in black letters on a white background. The quilt soothed this all-too-human fear of being forgotten by giving people a place where they knew they would be remembered.

Later stories sometimes paint the quilt as a heartwarming, feel-good narrative, but as Smith says: ‘It was really a very dark time right then in the Castro. I think there was a lot more desperation than often comes across.’ By 1995, 10% of the 1,600,000 men in the USA aged 25-44 who identified as gay had died, in what’s been called a literal decimation. What’s the weight of all this grief? In terms of the quilt itself, 54 tons. In the midst of this, the kind of mainstream awareness and acknowledgement that the quilt has today was unimaginable to its founders at the time. To date, 35 countries have contributed panels and the influence and impact of the quilt continues to grow. From San Francisco, the quilt has been folded and unfolded around the world, and this symbol for community and crafting has spread. The making of a quilt has become part of the fabric of AIDS protests. In 1988 one was begun in Australia, and another in 1999 in South Africa. In 2008 the Southern AIDS Living Quilt was started, to draw attention to the growing impact of AIDS on the lives of Black women in the American South; around that time it was the leading cause of death for Black women in the US aged 25-34, and they continue to be disproportionately affected. There is a quilt in the UK, too, commemorating around 384 people.

Today, the quilt remains a tribute to the lives of people neglected by the state, and a stinging rebuke to those who describe covid-19 as the unprecedented pandemic of our lifetimes. It will not let people be forgotten. Even as the world moves on, panels continue to arrive. During that pandemic, as with today’s, the impact on marginalised people, many of whom are healthcare workers, is outsized. Over recent months Gert McMullin has been making face masks out of quilt fabric offcuts, taking them to local hospitals. She said the isolation of covid-19 reminded her of the isolation of the AIDS pandemic, and that inspired her to help out. Some of the healthcare workers who received masks shared their memories with her of working during the height of the AIDS crisis. ‘The fabric we were going to use for people who died is now going to be used for people, hopefully, to live,’ she says. ‘I never would have guessed I would go through two pandemics and I’d be able to sew for both of them.’

This impact today is reflected in another project, which began in April this year. Australia-based social practice artists Kate Just and Tal Fitzpatrick launched the covid-19 Global Quilt project, an online initiative connecting people around the world through craft. Hand-embroidered squares show grief, anger, frustration – and defiance. Ellie Masterman from Oxford embroidered Boris Johnson in front of a crumbling NHS logo, clapping with blood on his hands. Jade Mariani from Brazil, where 1,000 people a day were dying at the time of writing, embroidered a mound of black and brown bodies. Nay King, a Māori woman living in Australia, embroidered the Māori flag, the Aboriginal flag and a Black Power clenched fist together. ‘The AIDS Quilt has undoubtedly shaped the way we as artists think about the role of participatory art-making and its capacity to help communities process trauma, grief and oppression,’ says Just. ‘To this day, the AIDS Quilt is a defiant and deeply moving project that monumentalises the impact of the AIDS crisis and the people who were loved and lost. It is also a glorious example of people’s capacity to be creative and celebrate life and love – even in the face of unthinkable devastation.’

The interactive AIDS Quilt can be viewed online at aidsmemorial.org. Follow the covid-19 quilt project on Instagram @Covid19Quilt