Panels from the AIDS Memorial Quilt; photo from NYU
Nine panels from the AIDS Memorial Quilt will be on display at Bobst Library at NYU Sept. 12 - Dec. 15 alongside Violet Holdings: LGBTQ+ Highlights from the NYU Special Collections, an exhibition surveying queer life from the mid-1800s to the present.
Art & Public Policy Professor Karen Finley is a co-curator of this exhibition, which is a recognition of the Stonewall 50th Anniversary. She commented the following for an NYU news release:
“The AIDS crisis continues today, but from the early eighties to the late nineties it was especially hard hitting. The trauma to so many, to an LGBT generation, disproportionately felt amongst African Americans and Latinos, needs to be recognized. These quilt panels were made by survivors in memory of those who died from the illness but they also serve as arts activism, as resistance, as a call to not be silent,” said Karen Finley, an arts professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and co-curator of the AIDS Memorial Quilt exhibition at NYU.
“When people died, they were not given proper burials or funerals. But friends, lovers, family, and community members created this magnificent quilt to recognize and celebrate those who left us too soon. We honor the creation of this archive as an act of agency, illumination, and witnessing—a memento mori,' she continued."'