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the AIDS Memorial Quilt on display in Washington, D.C.

The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt began as a single panel honoring the life of a single man who died from AIDS complications. But before it was a quilt, it was an idea in the mind of Cleve Jones, gay rights activist and one of the founders of the NAMES Project Foundation.

Jones was helping to organize a candlelight march in San Francisco in 1985 to honor the deaths of Harvey Milk and George Moscone when he saw a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle declaring that 1000 people had been killed by AIDS in San Francisco alone. Struck by the need to both honor the dead and force people to see the devastation caused by the disease, Jones and his friend Joseph Durant brought cardboard placards and magic markers with them to the march and asked people to write down the names of people they knew who had died of AIDS. At the end of the march, they gathered around the Federal Building and used ladders to tape the placards to the wall. In a 2004 interview with Frontline, Jones recalled that moment:

“There were thousands of people standing there, almost silent. I walked with the crowd, and I could hear people whispering and looking at the names and reading them and saying: "I didn't know he died; when did he get sick? I went to school with him; I didn't know he was sick. I didn't know he died." I was just overwhelmed by the need to find a way to grieve together for our loved ones who had died so horribly, and also to try to find the weapon that would break through the stupidity and the bigotry and all of the cruel indifference that even today hampers our response. I got to the edge of the crowd, and I looked back at that patchwork of names on the wall, and I thought, it looks like a quilt.”

Nearly two years later, Jones created the first 3 by 6 foot panel honoring his best friend, Marvin Feldman. Durant made another for Edward Mock. By the time it was first displayed publicly in 1987, the Quilt contained 1,920 panels. Now, there are more than 48,000 panels, all created and sewn together by friends, family, and loved ones to create the single largest work of collaborative art in the world.

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