Adam White Aids Memorial Quilt

8/2/2019 Adam White Aids Memorial Quilt

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Adam White

Professor Berger

HAVC 46

29 February 2012

The AIDS Memorial Quilt and its Implications

Contemporary Americans often associate the 1980s with mental images picturing the

time of as a decade of economic success, rock and roll, glamour, a high point in American

society. For thousands of people this is not the case; the 80s mark a period in American

history filled with grief, sadness, anger, and neglect. The AIDS epidemic was a prime factor

in surfacing these emotions. By 1985, thousands across the nation had died as a cause of the

disease. In that year, Cleve Jones of San Francisco came up with the idea of honoring these

men and women by a massive public art project taking the form of a quilt, now known as the

NAMES Project Memorial Quilt. By taking the form of a quilt, this memorial has profound

unspoken implications based on American tradition. Its creation is indicative of the fact that

people with AIDS in the 1980s were misrepresented in the mainstream, so marginalized by

society that without some way to publically and individually remember them they may have

had no way to leave behind a legacy beyond the stereotypical representation of someone with

AIDS. Government as well played a role in the epidemic, and they needed to see a visual

manifestation of the lives lost to AIDS to realize how their lack of intervention perpetuated

the issue.

The NAMES Project Quilt1 is the worlds largest public art project that to this day, is

still being added to. It is created not by one person or for one person, but for thousands.

Currently, it is made up of over 47,000 different panels, each one dedicated to a person or


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persons lost to AIDS. The panels are made by the friends, lovers, or families of the deceased

and sent to the NAMES Project to be included in the quilt. These panels are symbolic even in

their basic form. They are three feet by six feet and contain the name of the person it is

dedicated to, qualities that are not dissimilar to a plot in a cemetery. The scale of the quilt in

its entirety as well as the similarities between the panels and grave sites essentially give the

viewer walking through it a sense of being in a cemetery. Although each panel has the same

basic properties, they all contain visual elements that tell a unique story about the person it is

commemorating.

It is not a requirement that the panels be made out of a fabric in the manner of a

traditional quilt - they are often made out of objects that have some sentimental relation to the

person being commemorated on the panel, such as a pair of their shoes or some other article

of clothing, or an object that belonged to them, further individualizing each panel of the quilt.

By personalizing each panel while at the same time uniting them behind the same cause the

quilt is affectively challenging the 80s US medias portrayal of a person with AIDS being a

narcissistic and reckless gay man (Marita Sturkin 150). It represents every demographic

being affected by the disease; showing that the crisis reaches across all racial, sexual,

economical, and social boundaries. Through text and symbols panels can go to great lengths

in constructing a persons identity and providing biographical information about them,

making it easier for the mainstream to relate to those affected by the disease, successfully

changing their view of who is susceptible to the disease and putting an end to their

discrimination. For example, in the panel dedicated to Frank Feeney2, includes important

dates in his life, and block letters attached to the panel describe his relations with others son,

brother, uncle, friend, teacher. These types of panels invoke emotional responses, easing the


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process of replacing a viewers preconceived notions of who gets the disease with a better

understanding of the reach and effects of the disease.

The quilt has been showcased in its entirety only a handful of times, and each time it

has, it was displayed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. What is the significance in

using this location for its display? By being at the National Mall it is surrounded by countless

war memorials that were made for the sake of remembering individuals that have lost their

lives in battle and marking those battles and lives as significant in the history of the United

States. Similarly, the quilt serves to memorialize the individuals whose lives were lost to

extreme circumstances, while its location serves to imply that the fight against AIDS is a

significant battle in US history. The difference, however, is that the war memorials will

always remain the same the AIDS memorial, sadly, only gets larger. Each time it has been

shown it has been a reminder that American lives arestillbeing lost to AIDS epidemic and

the battle against it is still not over. In the 80s, displaying it at the capitol sent the message

that it was a necessary call to action for the US government to finally acknowledge the AIDS

crisis and to see what their lack of intervention was perpetuating.

To get an idea of how the government was reacting to the crisis, note that it took until

1988 for Ronald Reagan to say the word AIDS in public (Steven James Gambardella 217).

Sturkin explains that at the same time the visibility of the gay and lesbian community was at

its height and AIDS began killing people, there was the rise of a politically powerful religious

right wielding a rhetoric of morality, shame, and narrowly defined family values (146).

Because gay men were the first demographic to visibly be dying of AIDS, this religious right

primarily associated the disease with moral deviancy, and formed their public policies as

such. To them, AIDS was a gay issue that they did not need to intervene with. The AIDS


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Quilt, by representing everyone who was being affected by this issue, acted as a visual

counter argument to this false rhetoric and a successful protest against the discrimination in

US politics

It makes perfect sense to use a quilt as the medium for this memorial. Although its

use of unconventional materials and objects challenges the idea of what constitutes a quilt, it

shares remarkable qualities with traditional quilts and the reasoning and function of making

them. Indeed, quilts have a rich legacy that makes them culturally relevant and socially

powerful. Traditionally in the United States, quilt making has allowed marginalized and

misrepresented groups, almost exclusively women, to come together and unite behind similar

social and political issues. Carolyn Senft writes that during the womens rights movement,

for example, quilting bees supported quilt making for raising funds and recruiting new

members (146). Comparable to these quilting bees, the AIDS Quilt brings people together in

the fight against AIDS and to fundraise for community-based AIDS service organizations. It

reworked the traditional past time of using the social process of quilt making for bringing

people together in the name of a common goal to be more affective in a more contemporary

setting. It also has a striking resemblance to a patchwork quilt, as well as sharing functions

inherent in their design. Patchwork quilts are made of an assortment of unused, recycled, or

remnant fabrics. The nature of these fragments in many cases can cause the maker of the quilt

to associate them with memories of a time, a place, a person, or something else significant to

the maker. By selectively piecing together these fragments, the quilt maker forms a narrative

of their memories. The patchwork quilt, in a way, is a method of linking the past to the

present (Janet Floyd 55) time will pass but the memories of the past remain current through

the physical embodiment in a quilt. Panel makers of the AIDS Quilt in many times use a


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patchwork motif to tell a story about the person they are commemorating. The entire quilt,

when looked at as a whole, is a patchwork quilt that pieces together fragments of individuals

lives to commemorate not just the individual, but the entire spectrum of communities that

experienced the AIDS epidemic first hand, and memorializes them in a way that respects them

and does not marginalize them.

It must also be remembered that quilts, at their very basic level, are utilitarian devices

that have a specific purpose to provide warmth and comfort. When it was created, the AIDS

Quilt, in a sense, was a way to give these feelings to the communities being affected by AIDS.

There was wide spread feelings fear, grief, loss, anger, neglect, and confusion. The AIDS

Quilt served a therapeutic purpose to calm these feelings and provide comfort. It is not just

about memorializing the dead, it is also about bringing together those living that are affected

by the grief the epidemic brought on- creating a diverse community with a common bond that

can help each other get through the emotional pain.

The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt is a significant work of art that made

during the height of the AIDS crisis that reveals a great deal about the social, political, and

cultural climate of the 1980s. By drawing upon and expanding upon the traditional uses of

quilts in American culture, it served as a means to change opinions and gain political power

and social acceptance. It makes a statement that people with AIDS were a highly marginalized

group of people in the 1980s that perhaps may have had no means to leave behind a legacy

beyond the medias the inaccurate representations of them. Government, in addition, played a

significant role in the epidemic. They further marginalized by willfully ignoring the problem,

perpetuating the spread of the disease, and needed to see a visual manifestation of what their

neglect was causing. To this day AIDS still affects the lives of thousands of people.


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However, the quilt was successful in bringing the issue in to the main stream, getting the

government to acknowledge it as a problem, and correcting preconceived notions and

stereotypes of who is affected by AIDS that were formed in the early years of the epidemic.


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Images

1.

The AIDS quilt on the National Mall in 1996. (Paul Margolies)

2.


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Frank Feeneys Panel, on the bottom row.


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Works Cited

Floyd, Janet. "Back Into Memory Land? Quilts And The Problem Of History." Women's Studies 37.1

(2008): 38-56. Print.

Gambardella, Steven James. Absent Bodies: The AIDS Memorial Quilt as Social Melancholia.

Journal of American Studies 45.2 (2011): 213 226. Print.

Senft, Carolyn. Cultural Artifact and Architectural Form: A Museum of Quilts and Quilt Making.

Journal of Architectural Education 48.3 (1995): 144-153. Print.

Sturkin, Marita. Tangled Memories. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1997. Print.

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Adam White Aids Memorial Quilt