How a New Generation of AIDS Memorials Is Shedding Light on the Epidemic

On May 18, 1981, physician and writer Dr. Lawrence Mass reported on an “exotic new disease” affecting the gay community for New York City’s local gay paper, The New York Native. By the end of that year, 130 people in the United States had died from the mystery illness. By the end of the decade, over 100,000 had died of AIDS.

Memorials have long sought to make sense of this cascading, exponential explosion of grief. The catastrophic emotional weight of the AIDS crisis at its peak cannot be overstated. In his scathing 1983 essay entitled “1,112 and Counting” for The New York Native, Larry Kramer, activist, playwright, and founder of ACT UP, reflected on the devastating loss, condemning those who remained passive in the face of despair.

“I am angry and frustrated almost beyond the bound my skin and bones and body and brain can encompass,” Kramer wrote. “My sleep is tormented by nightmares and visions of lost friends, and my days are flooded by the tears of funerals and memorial services and seeing my sick friends. How many of us must die before all of us living fight back?”

Boiling with anger, those most affected by the crisis set out to reckon with their grief. The first collective AIDS memorial projects first emerged in the wake of this mourning and were focused primarily on cataloging and honoring the deceased. It is only now that artists and urban planners have been moving beyond this model into a new era of memorializing the HIV/AIDS epidemic — one that reflects its continuing presence while still acknowledging that initial wave of loss.

The most notable of the early AIDS memorials took the form of large-scale public artworks that commemorated those who had died from the illness. The AIDS Memorial Quilt, first displayed in 1987, was a multidisciplinary work and fundraising initiative that honored thousands of lives lost to AIDS through brilliant, hand-stitched panels, engraved with the names of the deceased.

Activist Cleve Jones developed the first panel for his friend, Marvin Feldman, who had died from AIDS on October 10, 1986. Subsequent panels were sourced from grieving family members and loved ones across the United States, each reflecting the haunting dimensions of a grave plot.

The collaborative and emotive work was publicly unveiled for the first time on October 11, 1987 on the National Mall. On this date, the 1,920 names stitched into the interwoven panels were read aloud before an audience of half a million people. This oratory tradition would become foundational to each display of the Quilt as it toured nationally and, in later years, internationally.

Much like the Quilt, the National AIDS Memorial Grove in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, established in 1991, was designed to remember the names of those lost to AIDS. Occupying seven acres of land, the meditative public park was conceived during the late 1980s and was officially recognized as the National AIDS Memorial of the United States in 1996 with the passage of the AIDS Memorial Grove Act.

Sequestered in The Grove’s Dogwood Crescent is a quiet gathering space and collective altar called The Circle of Friends. Here, over 2,500 names of those who have died from AIDS are etched into stone encircled by wooded forest.

In these shared processes of identifying, archiving, and naming the deceased, both the Grove and the Quilt provided much-needed visibility in their day. They testified to the expansiveness of the AIDS pandemic, underscored the urgency of the crisis, and critiqued the institutions that turned a blind eye to the crisis. But as always, in this process of accounting, we tend to see the gaps in our archives as we consider those who are left unnamed and the stories that have gone untold.

The most recent wave of AIDS memorials are diverging from these earlier attempts to tabulate and catalogue the deceased. Instead, they embody uncertainty and resistance within the pandemic’s calamitous history and yet-to-be-determined future.

New York City’s AIDS Memorial Park at St. Vincent’s Triangle, established in 2016, is one such monument that juxtaposes the past with an undetermined future. Constructed atop the former St. Vincent Hospital, where the first AIDS ward in New York City was founded in 1984, the memorial, designed by studio a+i and inscribed with a text work by conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, includes a cavernous steel structure composed of gridded, triangular shapes.

The potpourri of triangles symbolically allude to the ever-changing nature of the pandemic, reminding visitors that AIDS is not a relic of the past but rather a crisis that continues to demand action in the present. Holzer expressed this sentiment in an interview about the memorial with Phaidon:

The illness isn't beaten although treatment options are so much better. The disease persists as a threat to many, especially the most vulnerable. However there is great joy in that much shame is gone and openness is relatively possible. I remember the grotesque hostility and denial of the Reagan years, and their climate's passing is a victory and cause for celebration. Pragmatism, research, resources and mercy were required then, and are now.

The artist’s work is entombed in the granite floor and complements the acute geometric architecture with a gentle collage of phrases from Walt Whitman’s timeless 1855 poem “Song of Myself.” In this classic, the celebrated poet who was rumored to be gay, presents a loving ode to the human body as it merges with the interior “self.” Taken together, this conceptual marriage of the individual to a collective outcry for change forms an immortalizing force in the monument, threading the revolutionary struggle against AIDS across time and place.

The AIDS Memorial Pathway (AMP) in Seattle, unveiled in 2020, and the forthcoming AIDS Garden Chicago, similarly negotiate this commitment to preserving AIDS organizing and histories of queer resistance while demanding alternative futures. The AMP meanders through Seattle’s Capitol Hill, the nexus of the city’s LGBTQ+ community. The AIDS Garden Chicago, to be completed this Fall, marks the location of the infamous Belmont Rocks, a meeting place along the Lake Michigan shore where the local gay community gathered between the 1960s and 1990s.

In both memorials, commissioned works and installations serve as public interventions that challenge visitors to reflect and remember but also to mobilize for the future. IN THIS WAY WE LOVED ONE ANOTHER, Storme Webber’s notable photographic series in the AMP, intervenes on the rapidly gentrifying Capitol Hill neighborhood in which it stands. In a series of nostalgic, larger-than-life images, the series captures buried narratives of Black and brown working class activists and leaders lost to AIDS.

Meanwhile, in the AIDS Garden Chicago, the monumental 30-foot sculpture “Self-Portrait” by the unforgettable late artist and activist Keith Haring, who died tragically young of AIDS in 1990, looms over a once treasured safe-haven for queer communion.

Through these studied selections of place in each memorial, the creators of AIDS Memorial Park at St. Vincent’s Triangle, the AMP, and AIDS Garden Chicago are lacing the present day with the enduring legacy of the AIDS pandemic. As we reach 40 years since the dawn of the pandemic in the United States, these works function as urgent calls to action while the virus continues to affect so many across the globe.

When communities grieve and take strides toward healing, the desire to seek some finality through memorialization is common. We see this especially in the never-ending lists of names of the deceased that characterized the first wave of AIDS memorials. Decades later, still reeling from incomprehensible loss, our approach to commemoration today not only sets out to report our collective loss, but also leans into the unknown.

It is in these archival fissures — the flurry of unresolved questions — that we unearth the histories yet to be told.

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