Madeleine Fugate holds up a panel of the Covid Memorial Quilt, which will be displayed in museums, hospitals, churches, schools and traveling exhibitions (WNV/Lisa Smith)The TRC has a fascinating collection of American quilts. Among the many different kinds there is one category called commemorative quilts, which are made to commemorate a particular event or person.
A schoolgirl from California (US) is creating one such quilt, to remember those who have died of COVID-19. “I was watching the news and they kept saying ‘the numbers’ are going up and I said, ‘They aren’t numbers, they’re people.’ My mom worked on the AIDS Memorial Quilt in the 1980s, so I said, ‘Let’s make a Covid Memorial Quilt to honour the people who died and help our country heal’,” Madeleine Fugate explained. She began the quilt in April 2020, when she was 13 years old. It was part of a school community action project called “Young Change-Makers in a COVID-19 World.
“My mom told me how healing and almost magical it [the AIDS Memorial Quilt] was at the time. She lost people she loved and no one was honouring them. That was 35 years ago, and now people are dying again from another virus in another pandemic and we are in pain again.
Panels of the Aids Memorial Quilt on display at the National Mall, Washington D.C., USA, July 2012.So, I reached out to the Board of Directors of the AIDS Memorial Quilt to tell them about my idea and ask for their advice. …I also spoke to Cleve Jones, the Founder of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. He was touched that a girl like me would care about him or what he did in the 1980s, but I think what he did was an act of love and we all need more love right now,” Madeleine continued. Jones explained how to construct panels strong enough to be hung and displayed. He also recommended making the COVID memorial panels smaller than the 3 feet by 6 feet AIDS Memorial Quilt panels, a number chosen as it was the size of an average grave.
The COVID quilt panels are 48 inches square and made up of 25 individual memorial squares, each 8 inch by 8 inch. Madeleine liked this size “because when you flip an eight by its side, it becomes the infinity symbol, to show that energy keeps going.”
Hundreds of memorial squares have come in from the US and around the world. A team of volunteers, supervised by the Textiles and Costume Design teacher of Madeleine’s school, sew the panels. Non-sewers can also participate: the team will make a memorial square from jackets, T-shirts, photos or other contributions, while a retired teacher will embroider names or lines from favorite poems.
Panels from the COVID Quilt have already been on display, in local art galleries, at the California Science Center (Los Angeles) and at the International Quilt Museum (Nebraska).
For more information about the COVID Memorial Quilt see here, or here.
Shelley Anderson, 12 February 2022
