Just over a decade ago, the then NAMES Project Foundation President and CEO Julie Rhoad called the American Folklife Center seeking advice about how to ensure the future of the National AIDS Memorial Quilt. She wanted collaborators in her quest to identify the next home for the Quilt’s collections and to determine how would they be managed.
Betsy Peterson, Director of the American Folklife Center at the time, replied, “Well, you know, that’s what we do.”
“I’m telling you, I had this moment where I might have squealed and cried at the same time, because I thought, this is it!” Julie later recalled.
She was right.
Julie recounted that call for a large audience of dignitaries, activists, cultural workers, and citizens who gathered in the Library of Congress’s Great Hall in 2019 to celebrate an historic collaboration between the National AIDS Memorial and the Library: together, they would steward the collection.
Today, as part of a collaboration with the National AIDS Memorial (NAM), which became the permanent caretaker and steward of the Quilt in 2019, the American Folklife Center is home to more than 200,000 AIDS Memorial Quilt records. These records offer an intimate look at the lives of those who died from AIDS and help humanize and capture the scale of the AIDS pandemic in a singular and public way. The collection documents the evolution of the treatment and social views related to one of the U.S.’s ongoing Civil Rights struggles.
Researchers interested in folk art, memory, grief, social activism, public health, and the international struggle for human rights will find valuable information in this collection. And last week, their research got a lot easier: the bulk of collection, now digitized, went online at https://www.loc.gov/collections/aids-memorial-quilt-records/.
The Quilt itself is stewarded by the National AIDS Memorial in San Francisco, which partners with community-based organizations across the country to display Quilt sections and to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS impacting people today. Our organizations play to each of our strengths, leveraging the preservation and access capacity of the Library and the deep community ties of the National AIDS Memorial to safeguard the memory of the AIDS movement for generations to come.
At AFC, the journey from that first phone call to this month’s launch of the digital collection has been long, but rewarding. It took many dedicated staff members and collaborators outside of the Library to make it happen. Here is a glimpse of that story.
Encountering the collection
At Betsy’s behest, I first visited the NAMES Project headquarters in Atlanta in late 2013 to view the collection in my capacity then as Head of the AFC Archives. I arrived to find a small, friendly, and dedicated staff running the largest grassroots HIV/AIDS-related volunteer organization in the country. They were actively managing the receipt of new panels, the stewardship of 54 tons of fabric honoring 92,000 individuals, and operating active education and Quilt loan programs. I spent lots of time with Julie and Roddy Williams, who managed Quilt operations (he still does in California!), who generously helped me acclimate to the collection and its rich history.
The headquarters had three distinctive work areas: the warehouse, the sewing repair and shipment area, and the front office. The décor was playful and vibrant. Many colorful posters from past Quilt events adorned the walls, along with a bank of 35 donated sewing machines upon which some quilts were created. The most famous sewing machine, “Connie,” was in active use by Quilt Conservator Gert McMullin, one of the Quilt founders, who repairs the Quilt and sews the panels into larger blocks.
What the NAMES Project called the “Document and Media Archive” was organized into two general categories: 1) documentation associated with the Quilt’s decades of display, workshop programs, and other administrative activities, and; 2) records generated by quilt makers that directly relate to persons listed on panels (a.k.a. “panel maker files”).
The panel maker files spanned more than 100 linear feet within fireproof filing cabinets in the sewing repair and shipment room. In the warehouse, event posters and submitted photos were kept in about 40 map case drawers. Nine “blue packs,” large storage containers, held materials associated with the Document and Media Archive, ranging from videos to exhibit publications. The rest of the blue packs held quilt fabric.
The records come to the Library
It would take six years and multiple trips to Atlanta to finalize the gift agreement, prepare the collection for transfer, and plan for its care once at the Library.
By fall of 2019, the Library held a signing ceremony involving Julie from the NAMES Project, and John Cunningham, CEO of the National AIDS Memorial. A couple of months later, the acquisition culminated in a wonderful ceremony in the Library’s Great Hall and a display of the newly arrived items. (More information about that event can be found on Folklife Today.) After the event, a portion of the collection was on display in the Great Hall through World AIDS Day. A special feature was the Quilt panel made by Library of Congress employees commemorating colleagues who died of AIDS.
Just as staff had developed and implemented workflows for processing the unique collection – which is more like 50,000 small collections than one group of manuscripts – a new pandemic struck. I remember in March 2020 sitting at safe distance outdoors with lead processing archivist Charlie Hosale discussing issues involving the digital portion of the collection. The COVID-19 pandemic forced us all into telework, which gave Charlie the chance to prioritize processing of the digital files from the collection, something he could do remotely.
Once back onsite in fall 2020, staff developed new socially distant and asynchronous processing workflows and continued in earnest. Preparing the collection required not only the support of AFC archives staff, but also help from the Conservation Division as we began collection digitization. Preservation specialist Kate Morrison-Danzis was among those who performed stabilization treatments to ensure every item can be safely handled and the information is fully legible during image capture.
By fall 2022, Charlie, archivist Farrah Cundiff, and processing technician Serena Chiu, finished processing the bulk of the “panel maker files” associated with the AIDS Quilt. AFC was already starting to provide researcher access to these records while we finalized an online access agreement with the National AIDS Memorial, the collection rights holders.
A focus on collection access
Even before the recent online publication, the Quilt’s physical collection was being steadily used in the American Folklife Center’s Reading Room. Graduate students, filmmakers, and those whose loved ones are commemorated on the Quilt have made visits to DC to do research. The 2022 Kluge Prize awardee Dr. George Chauncey used AIDS Quilt materials in his program for educators about AIDS and LGBTQ rights activism, a collaboration with the Library’s Teaching with Primary Sources program. This access has been facilitated by AFC staff’s initial digitization of the records, which was funded with a Ford Foundation grant to advance access to the Library’s social justice collections. Afterward, a second round of Ford Foundation funding was dedicated to completing digitization of the collection. The Library’s Digital Collections Management and Services Division coordinated the effort, with Steve Berkley taking the lead on the AFC side.
Displaying the collection
In June 2024, the “Collecting Memories: Treasures from the Library of Congress” exhibit opened to the public in the new David M. Rubenstein Treasures Gallery in the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building. It explores how cultures preserve memory, including the role of the Library of Congress in preserving collective memories. The exhibit features materials from Block 1333 of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Featured are materials related to the life of David Keisacker, which were donated by his partner, Steve Horwitz, in 1989. It includes photos of Keisacker, Keisacker’s memorial service program, and Horwitz’s memorial of Keisacker’s life. Keisacker’s materials represent just one of the thousands of lives memorialized in the AIDS Memorial Quilt Records.
The same month, the Quilt and the records were featured during a display for Elton John, winner of the 2024 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Also, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi had a special viewing of the exhibit and the collection. Pelosi has had a long connection to the Quilt and was instrumental in gaining approval for its iconic display on the National Mall. In her remarks during a 2019 special event to mark a new phase in stewardship of the Quilt, she noted that Librarian “Dr. (Carla) Hayden spoke so beautifully about having the Library of Congress receive, not the Quilt, but all of the memorabilia associated with it. And in doing so it raises the profile of it, the opportunity for others to see it, the visibility of it. But in return all of this information about the NAMES Project brings luster to the Library of Congress as well. This is a beautiful gift to our nation.”
The digital collection launched on World AIDS Day 2024 and coincided with a special display of a portion of the Quilt on the White House lawn. While we celebrate this major milestone, there is more work to be done. In 2025, we plan to process the business records of the NAMES Project and publish a detailed finding aid describing the full collection. We also plan to support the National AIDS Memorial as they work on expanding their online resource to unite the high-resolution panel images they have with the associated digital records at the Library.
As I think of all that has been accomplished since Julie’s first phone call to AFC, I am reminded of the power of collaboration and the power of the people whose stories are at the heart of the collection. She said it best in her 2019 remarks at the Library:
“This morning we’ve come to our nation’s capital once again to announce our plans for the future of the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the NAMES Project. And we are here with some of the most powerful ambassadors and envoys to the cause of human rights that we’ve ever known. And they are the panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. They are our guides. They are our navigators. They are our teachers. They stand ready to remind us all that we are connected one to another. And if we’re connected one to another then indeed we must be responsible one for another. They call on us.”