To mark the 35th anniversary of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, New Yorkers who lost loved ones or whose lives have been impacted by HIV will have a chance to add to the 54-ton tapestry this weekend.
The New York City AIDS Memorial is hosting workshops at the Whitney Museum this weekend for locals to work alongside artists to create new panels to add to the quilt, honoring the memory of those lost and raising awareness about the devastating disease that has killed more than 40.1 million people worldwide since 1981.
Among those, more than 100,000 New Yorkers have been lost since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.
“It’s important that we continue to remember these names,” Dave Harper, executive director of the New York City AIDS Memorial, told the Daily News.
“[It’s important to] remember our friends, our mentors, our heroes, our family, our neighbors,” he added, noting that the quilt is a “great teaching tool to connect people to the stories of those lost, but [it’s also] a reminder that this thing is continually growing because the AIDS epidemic isn’t over. And we have a lot of work to do still to end it.”
The AIDS Memorial Quilt was conceived by activist Cleve Jones to honor those lost to the disease amid the inaction of the Reagan administration throughout the 1980s.
The ever-growing quilt, the world’s largest piece of folk art, currently includes nearly 50,000 3-feet-by-6-feet panels, which have been dedicated to more than 110,000 people.
For this weekend’s initiative, the New York City AIDS Memorial — which opened in December 2016 as a way to preserve the legacy of those who died — joined forces with the National AIDS Memorial and the New York-based textile design studio Maharam for the sessions at the Whitney Museum.
Gert McMullin, one of the six activists who has worked preserving the quilt since it was first displayed in 1987, came in from San Francisco to participate the sessions, one of which happened Friday, and the other two taking place Saturday, from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., and from 3 to 7 p.m.
McMullin began working on the project as a volunteer as her friends “were the first to die” of AIDS in San Francisco. As the epidemic devastated an entire generation of gay men and trans women, she decided to quit her two jobs and dedicate her full-time attention to preserving the quilt — something she’s been doing for the past 35 years.
“It’s just been such a great experience,” McMullin said. “For all the horror and everything throughout the ’90s that I went through, It’s still one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life.”
The workshops are also a reminder of how artists have always been essential to raising awareness about the disease while using their work to support those affected by it — people forced to fight not only against a virus, but against stigma and prejudice — according to New York City-based artist Polly Apfelbaum, who’s contributing to the project.
The Philadelphia-born visual artist lost her first gallerist, a Brazilian named Paulo Salvador, to AIDS in 1989 when he was 31.
Salvador had a “tiny” gallery in the East Village, and he gave young artists opportunities to show their work. “It was very accessible and really about the community, about your friends. And it was a very special community,” Apfelbaum told The News. “And obviously, AIDS really decimated that community — I’ve been in New York long enough to remember that.”
Apfelbaum, who has shown at the Whitney, Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said that quilting has “quite a history” of communal work. “And with AIDS and COVID, there’s been a feeling that we need to get back to [that feeling of] community.”
According to the New York City AIDS Memorial, the workshops are sold out, but those who are interested can add their names to a waiting list.
“The response has been so incredible,” Harper said. “And they did fill up so quickly that [I think] this is something we’re going to look to do more frequently.”
