Southwest Florida AIDS Memorial Quilts Presented by CAN Community Health
December 1 – 3, 2022

AIDS Memorial Quilt
The AIDS Memorial Quilt is a powerful visual reminder of the AIDS pandemic. It is considered the largest community arts project in the world. Under the stewardship of the National AIDS Memorial, it has surpassed 50,000 individually sewn panels with more than 110,000 names stitched into its 54 tons of fabric.
The AIDS Memorial Quilt’s founder, Cleve Jones, chose 3-by-6-foot memorial panels the size of a grave so people could visualize 110,000 bodies.

The selection of twenty quilts on exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art to commemorate World AIDS Day on December 1 is presented by CAN Community Health. The quilts on view were created for the Southwest Florida Community AIDS Quilt Project, which began in 1994 when several HIV+ men wanted to memorialize the friends and loved ones they had lost. Done in the same manner as The NAMES Project (the National AIDS Memorial Quilt), they started creating panels with the names of those in the Sarasota-Bradenton area who had succumbed to HIV/AIDS.

Images © CAN Community Health Tampa Museum of Art

23 November 2022
Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa