With Pride month taking over New York, the city is bustling with memorials and events honoring those who have fought and continue to fight for the rights of the LGBTQ+ community. One of those memorials, The AIDS Memorial Quilt will be on display inside Brookfield Place this weekend. Pieces of the quilt, a powerful memorial which honors those who have died from AIDS, were originally displayed in Brookfield’s Winter Garden in 1992. The quilt makes its return this year as part of the 2019 WorldPride Quilt Initiative, an initiative which distributes pieces of the quilt to various city-based institutions for display. The Aids Memorial Quilt will be on display at the West Wall at Brookfield Place only until Monday July 1st.
The quilt is composed of more than 48,000 individual 3-by-6-foot memorial panels, sewn by hundreds of thousands of friends, lovers, and family members of those who have lost their lives to AIDS. Envisioned by San Francisco gay rights activist Cleve Jones in 1985, it remains the largest community art project in the world. Brookfield Place has collaborated with LGBTQIA+ community leaders to display nine of these breathtaking panels.
The quilt reveals the humanity behind the statistics of the disease, aiming to spread compassion and triumph over the stigma and phobia associated with AIDS. It has become a memorial, a tool for education, and a work of art. Most panels are accompanied by letters, biographies, and photos which articulate various experiences of those who dealt with the disease.
For every social media post taken at the Brookfield Place installation tagged with @BFPLNY and #BFPLpride, $1 (up to $25,000) will be donated to the Hetrick-Martin Institute, an LGBTQ youth support organization. Don’t miss your chance to see this amazing work of purposeful art and support a good cause this weekend. The quilt will be on display until 10:00PM, Monday, July 1st. You can see other pieces of the quilt at the Queens Museum, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Tenement Museum and other locations around New York City. See the full display schedule here.
Next, check out Celebrating Stonewall 50: The History of the Stonewall Riots in NYC and A Guide to NYC Pride 2019: 25 Events to Check Out This Month