For the second year, Skyline College Library is participating in an initiative known as “World AIDS Day” – observed globally on December 1 – to raise awareness, fight stigma and improve education about HIV/AIDS. In 2019, the Library displayed a block of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in the library in commemoration. This year the Library continues to create a digital space for our campus community to show support for people living with and affected by HIV — and to remember those who lost their lives to AIDS — by participating as a virtual display host of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the largest ongoing community folk art project in the world.
Eight individual blocks of the AIDS Memorial Quilt are now available for viewing at bit.ly/AidsMemorialEx through March 31. The Quilt, a powerful visual reminder of the AIDS pandemic, is composed of 50,000 individual 3-by-6-foot memorial panels commemorating more than 105,000 individual lives of people who have died of AIDS. The quilting blocks have been sewn together by friends, lovers and family members.
“Even though nothing can replace seeing our beautiful Quilt in person, this virtual exhibition allows us to still share the Quilt and its stories just as we have done for past three decades around World AIDS Day,” said Gert McMullan, a co-founder of the Quilt and Quilt Conservator At the National AIDS Memorial.
In addition to Skyline College, other California organizations are hosting blocks of this important quilt as well. You can find them here. The Library has also created a research guide to provide additional information about the quilt, World AIDS day and library resources for researching the AIDS epidemic here: https://guides.skylinecollege.edu/WorldAidsDayQuiltDisplay
The virtual exhibition, funded by the President’s Innovation Fund, will be on view through March 31, 2021. Questions? Please contact Pia Walawalkar <walawalkars@smccd.eu>.
Article by Jessica Silver-Sharp
