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Quilting guide

The AIDS Memorial Quilt

The AIDS Memorial Quilt is the largest community memorial quilt ever made. Each 3 × 6 foot panel remembers someone who died of AIDS, and the panels are joined into larger blocks for display. Like the 9-11 Memorial Quilt Project, it was built by ordinary people, most of them not quilters, who wanted a name to be remembered. The facts below come from the National AIDS Memorial, which cares for the Quilt today, and from the Library of Congress.

How it began

The idea came from San Francisco activist Cleve Jones in November 1985, at a candlelight march where people wrote the names of friends and partners lost to AIDS on placards and taped them to the old San Francisco Federal Building. Jones made the first panel, for his friend Marvin Feldman. In June 1987, Jones, Mike Smith, Gert McMullin and others formally organized the NAMES Project Foundation to collect panels.

The first display, 1987

On October 11, 1987, the Quilt was laid out for the first time on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. It had 1,920 panels. Jones, Smith and the NAMES Project Foundation were nominated for the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize.

How big it is now
PanelsNearly 50,000
People rememberedMore than 110,000
WeightEnormously heavy, many tons of fabric
Panel size3 × 6 feet
Last full displayOctober 1996, covering the National Mall and drawing huge crowds

The 1996 display was the last time the whole Quilt was shown in one place. It's now too large; sections travel instead and are shown many times a year with partners around the country.

Panels and blocks

A panel is 3 feet by 6 feet, roughly the size of a human grave, as Charles Hosale, an archivist at the American Folklife Center, describes it in a Library of Congress blog post on the Quilt.

For the Quilt, eight panels are sewn together into a square 12 feet on a side, which the National AIDS Memorial calls a "12-by-12" or a Block. Each Block is edged in canvas and given its own Block Number, which is how a particular panel is tracked once it joins the Quilt. Displays are counted in Blocks: at a June 2020 observance, forty Blocks were shown.

Where the Quilt is today

In November 2019, the National AIDS Memorial became the Quilt's permanent caretaker and brought it back to San Francisco, where the first panels arrived in early 2020. The Quilt's large archive of documents, cards and letters sent in by panel makers went to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

Seeing the Quilt

All of the panels can be viewed online. Through a partnership with the AIDS Quilt Touch team, the National AIDS Memorial offers an interactive version of the Quilt where you can search for the name of a friend or family member and look at each panel. That page links a PDF guide to searching by name.

To see panels in person, look for a community display. The Memorial partners with community-based organizations to show sections of the Quilt, and a group that wants to host one starts on its host a Quilt display page, which has the display requirements, the online registration and a toolkit. Hosting carries a fee, set out in the registration. The same page links a document for asking that a particular panel be included in a display.

How a panel is made

New panels are still being made. According to the National AIDS Memorial's panel-making guidance, the only two requirements are the size and the name: a panel is 3 by 6 feet and remembers someone who died of AIDS, and a panel may carry more than one name. The guidance also asks for:

  • a durable, medium-weight background fabric that doesn't stretch
  • a ½-inch margin around the edge, kept clear for sewing panels together
  • a hem, if possible

Paint, fine needlework, iron-on transfers and hand appliqué are all used. Check the current instructions on the National AIDS Memorial's make a panel page before you start; details like the margin have varied between guides over the years.

The guidance has practical notes on materials, too. Keep important words and images away from the edges, where the panel will be sewn to its neighbors. Glue doesn't hold up on fabric, so sew things on instead. For paint, it suggests textile paint, colorfast dye or permanent marker, and no puff paint. Photographs can go on as iron-on transfers or be sewn into clear vinyl pouches, but shouldn't be laminated. In a collage, leave out sharp or breakable objects; the suggestion is to recreate those things in fabric and sew them on. A panel can be laid out vertically or horizontally.

Sending a panel in

The Memorial asks that the panel arrive with a letter about the person: your relationship, how they'd want to be remembered and a favorite memory. If you can, add a photograph of them for the archives, and include the panel maker information form.

There are three ways to hand it over. You can mail it to the Memorial's address in San Leandro, California, by registered mail or a tracked carrier. You can drop it off by appointment at the Memorial's Castro Street office in San Francisco or at the warehouse. Or you can bring it to a local Quilt display, after checking with the host first, because some displays take new panels only on the last day. The current mailing address and contacts are on the make a panel page. Once a panel arrives, it's sewn into a Block with seven others, and the Memorial says the whole process typically takes 90 days to six months.

Why it matters to quilters

The Quilt showed how a quilt can carry grief and memory on a scale nothing else could, and many later community quilts, including the 9-11 project, followed the same idea: anyone can make a piece, and every piece has a name. If you're organizing a memorial quilt yourself, see how to organize a memorial quilt.

Sources: National AIDS Memorial, Quilt history, Make a panel, Interactive AIDS Quilt and Host a Quilt display; Library of Congress, AIDS Memorial Quilt Records and Charles Hosale, Treasures Gallery: The AIDS Quilt (2024).

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