T MAGAZINE: Imagining a Memorial to an Unimaginable Number of Covid Deaths

T Magazine writes about memorials, including the New York City AIDS Memorial, mentioning our AIDS Memorial Quilt-Making Workshops at the Whitney which took place in October.

The author, Mark Harris, writes: “I think of grief and anger whenever I walk through New York City’s AIDS Memorial, an open space in the West Village that was completed in 2016 by the Manhattan-based Studio AI Architects. The design for the park was, appropriately to the history of AIDS activism, not arrived at without dispute and complaint and recrimination. Even today, its plaza approach — a set of slatted walls and roof panels, all widely vented to create an open, airy pavilion that consists only of an engraved granite pavement by the artist Jenny Holzer, a modest fountain and a couple of low benches — has its share of detractors. I know one activist who won’t set foot on the site, insisting that it has no more gravitas than a bus stop. But I love it. I love the fact that it is built on a triangular island with a design created out of dozens of triangles, a shape uniquely meaningful in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement and a statement that the site is intended to memorialize activism as well as loss. I love the fact that on one side, it defiantly faces a luxury condo that is itself an attempt to overwrite rather than to acknowledge history — those buildings across Seventh Avenue rose on the block that used to house St. Vincent’s Hospital, an epicenter of the early pandemic, and it seems apt that its residents, when they look out of their windows, should be reminded of where they live and of what their homes are built on. And I even love the fact that many people treat it as just another of the city’s pocket parks, a small public space for work, life and pleasure. Last year, I ran into a beloved gay writer there; he was sitting under the triangles with his MacBook Pro balanced on his knees, working on a script and, to be honest, maybe doing a little late summer cruising. Gay creativity and gay longing both asserting themselves even atop tragedy felt right to me.”