AIDS Memorial Quilt on display in Gwinnett

We almost forgot to mention it, but a section of the AIDS Memorial Quilt went on display at the UGA Gwinnett Campus in Lawrenceville today and will be on view there through Saturday. Here's the press release from UGA News Service.

Lawrenceville, Ga. – A section of the internationally celebrated AIDS Memorial Quilt—the 54-ton, handmade tapestry that stands as a memorial to more than 91,000 individuals lost to AIDS—will be on view from Jan. 25-30 at the University of Georgia Gwinnett Campus in Lawrenceville.

The display is being presented by the department of student affairs at the Gwinnett Campus. Visitors may view the quilt from 8 a.m.-7 p.m. in the lobby of the building at 2530 Sever Road, just off 1-85 at the Old Peachtree Road exit.

The NAMES Project Foundation, established in 1987, is the international organization that is the custodian of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The AIDS Memorial Quilt began with a single panel created in San Francisco in 1987. Today, the quilt is composed of more than 47,000 individual 3 x 6 foot panels, each one commemorating the life of someone who has died of AIDS. These panels come from every state in the nation, every corner of the globe and they have been sewn by hundreds of thousands of friends, lovers and family members into this epic memorial, the largest piece of ongoing community art in the world.

“These handmade blocks, created by friends and family, tell the stories of real people who were loved and lost to AIDS,” said Julie Rhoad, executive director of the NAMES Project Foundation. “We bring you their stories in the hope of inspiring compassion, healing and personal responsibility. We thank UGA for hosting this event and we invite visitors to see what wonderful healing art we have created together as a nation.”

Sections are continuously on display across the country in schools, places of worship, community centers, businesses, corporations and a variety of other institutional settings in the hope of making the realities of HIV and AIDS real, human and immediate. To date, more than 17 million people have seen the AIDS Memorial Quilt at tens of thousands of displays throughout the world.

For more information on the display at the UGA Gwinnett Campus, call 678/985-6767.

For more information on the NAMES Project and the AIDS Memorial Quilt, see www.aidsquilt.org or call the national headquarters in Atlanta at 404/688-5500.

The quilt is not only a touching memorial but a giant, collaborative work of art, and we'd certainly recommend you stop by and take a look.