The next exhibition of the Hand Bookbinders of California (HBC) will include ~20 books made from pieces of a decommissioned gay pride flag that had flown in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco. Read more background here on HBC’s website. Initially, I thought that I’d upcycle images from the 1987 Gay Pride March. As a blossoming artist/photographer, I photographed people’s feet as they wandered around the handmade panels that comprised the NAMES Quilt. According to lgbtqnation[dot]com here’s the origin story of the quilt:

The concept came from Cleve Jones, a San Francisco protégé of Harvey Milk, the gay city supervisor assassinated with Mayor George Moscone in 1978. At the 1985 candlelight march commemorating them, Jones had asked marchers to hold signs with the names of people who had died due to complications from HIV — more than a thousand in the city by that point. He and others affixed them to the federal building, in patchwork quilt fashion.

Jones and others were thus inspired to start The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.

I’ve pivoted and I will print and affix some words to my 10- by 240-inch piece of the flag, which was initially raised the day Dianne Feinstein passed away. It is, after all, a book. The image below was part of an exhibition of my images that was displayed in a St. Paul, MN gallery (the name of which I’ve forgotten!) in 1988. The text reads:

Quilting is the piecing together of scraps from various sources. Gays are still largely considered marginal or outcasts — scraps, if you will. Bits of fabric create, when united, a single substantial unit replete with sentiment and tradition. So too the spirit of the gay community is stitching together its lost (I mean dead) souls into a uniquely vital work.

We recognize the character of a people by how it honors their dead. The gay community employs art, thereby valuing expressiveness, sensitivity and individuality. For aeons death has been controlled by religion, money and politics in a uniform prescribed manner: buried, burned, filed in drawers.

Art, love and compassion are creating a new ritual: quilting together against forgetfulness.