AIDS Quilt On Display in Shevchenko Park

The Dupont Circle BID is partnering with the National AIDS Memorial to display 20 panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The Quilt panels will be on display at Shevchenko Park, located at 22nd and P Streets, NW on Saturday, May 31 from 12:00-5:00 p.m. and Sunday, June 1 from 12:00-5:00 p.m. The display is free and open to the public, featuring panels of the Quilt made by friends and loved ones from the region who died of AIDS.

The Quilt is the largest community arts project in the world. Its first panels were created during the darkest days of the AIDS crisis. Today the Quilt consists of 50,000 individually-sewn panels with the names of more than 110,000 people who have died of AIDS.

The Quilt was created in the 1980s during the darkest days of the AIDS crisis by gay rights activist Cleve Jones. While planning a march in San Francisco in 1985, he was devastated by the thousands of lives that had been lost to AIDS in San Francisco, and he asked each of his fellow marchers to write on placards the names of friends and loved ones who had died. Jones and others stood on ladders taping these placards to the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building. The wall of names looked like a patchwork quilt, and inspired by this sight, Jones and friends made plans for a larger memorial. In 1987, a group of strangers began gathering in a San Francisco storefront to document the lives they feared would be forgotten. Their goal was to create a memorial for those who had died of AIDS, and understand the devastating impact of the disease. This served as the foundation of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Later that year, nearly 2,000 of its panels were displayed on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

In 1996, the National Memorial Quilt attracted nearly 1.2 million visitors in October 1996 – filling the Mall from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. Over the three-day event, more than 40,000 panels were displayed. Notably, President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton attended, marking the last full exhibition of the Quilt on the Mall. By this point, the HIV/AIDS epidemic was starting to see a major decline (credit: Wikipedia).

Don't miss this brief chance to see real LGBT+ history return in DC. Get your free RSVP and we'll see you there!