AIDS Memorial Quilt
Arguably, the best-known undertaking of HIV memorialization is the NAMES Project’s AIDS Memorial Quilt, imagined by activist Cleve Jones. The Quilt was first presented to the public in 1987, when 1,920 handmade quilt panels covered a space larger than a football field on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Each panel was a tribute to a friend, lover, parent or stranger who had died with HIV. The Quilt was last shown in its entirety in 2012, in conjunction with the XIX International AIDS Conference in DC. By that point, with over 47,000 panels dedicated to more than 90,000 individuals, the Quilt was too large to be displayed in one place, so it “blanketed the capital”—as promotional material at the time declared—and was laid out over the National Mall as well as in museums and other cultural spaces throughout the city.
