News Briefs: Panel workshops offered ahead of quilt display
The National AIDS Memorial Grove has announced that panel-making workshops will be held over the next couple of weeks ahead of the historic AIDS Memorial Quilt display set for San Francisco's Golden Gate Park in June.The AIDS grove, which took over stewardship of the quilt in 2019, stated that the free workshops will be held June 1 and 8, from 3 to 6 p.m., at its offices at 543 Castro Street in San Francisco.As the Bay Area Reporter previously reported, a massive display of the quilt is set for June 11-12 in Robin Williams Meadow, with some panels being displayed in the AIDS grove, which is also located in Golden Gate Park.
The San Francisco installation will include 350 blocks of the quilt, which contain almost 3,000 panels, according to Kevin Herglotz, a gay man who is chief operating officer for the grove. (A block of the quilt has eight panels.)Each three foot by six foot panel commemorates a loved one who lost their life to AIDS.
They create a moving personal tribute to a loved one and can be made through paint, fine needlework, iron-on transfers, hand-made appliques, spray paint, or the traditional old-fashioned quilting, a news release stated.Many new panels are expected to be part of the upcoming display, which will mark 35 years since the first panels of the quilt were created during the darkest days of the AIDS pandemic.The upcoming AIDS quilt display will be the largest ever in San Francisco and the biggest installation anywhere in the U.S.
in a decade — the last such showing was in Washington, D.C. 10 years ago, Herglotz said.The Names Project, the former nonprofit home of the quilt, ceased operations following its wind-down after the November 2019 announcement that the AIDS grove would take over the.
