News & Press


Dave Harper Dave Harper

CBS NEW YORK: World AIDS Day memorial held in West Village

Thursday is World AIDS Day, and for the first time since 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, the names of New Yorkers we've lost were read at a memorial in the West Village. As CBS2's Alice Gainer reports, while today is a day to remember, it's also a day to raise awareness about the ongoing fight against HIV/AIDS.

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Dave Harper Dave Harper

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 … 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.”

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Dave Harper Dave Harper

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: New Yorkers mark 35th anniversary of AIDS Memorial Quilt by adding to the 54-ton folk art piece

To mark the 35th anniversary of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, New Yorkers who lost loved ones or whose lives have been impacted by HIV will have a chance to add to the 54-ton tapestry this weekend. The New York City AIDS Memorial is hosting workshops at the Whitney Museum this weekend for locals to work alongside artists to create new panels to add to the quilt, honoring the memory of those lost and raising awareness about the devastating disease that has killed more than 40.1 million people worldwide since 1981.

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Dave Harper Dave Harper

MAHARAM STORIES: The AIDS Memorial Quilt by Gert McMullin

Gert McMullin is one of the six activists who cofounded the AIDS Memorial Quilt in San Francisco in 1987 and has served as the Quilt’s conservator ever since. In partnership with the National AIDS Memorial and Maharam, we hosted a series of public quilt-making workshops at the Whitney Museum on October 14 and 15, 2022 to mark the Quilt's thirty-fifth anniversary. Read more from Gert here.

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Dave Harper Dave Harper

GAY CITY NEWS: New York City AIDS Memorial hosts silent disco

DJ Lady Bunny and DJ Lina headlined a “Dance for Memorial” silent disco event at the New York City AIDS Memorial on June 29. Participants wore headphones and danced away in the area surrounding the memorial at West 12th Street and Greenwich Avenue in Greenwich Village.

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Dave Harper Dave Harper

METROPOLIS: Songs of Activism and Solidarity Adorn New York City’s AIDS Memorial

One critical goal of public art is to engage with every passerby in order to foster a dialogue within communities. For multimedia artist, Steven Evans, music is just one way of achieving this. After coming of age during the height of the United States’ AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, Evans has drawn inspiration from his youth’s pop songs for his latest temporary installation at New York City’s AIDS Memorial. The result memorializes and celebrates the queer struggle—then and now.

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Dave Harper Dave Harper

ARTNET NEWS: Editors’ Picks: 11 Events for Your Art Calendar This Week

At the beginning of Pride Month, the New York City AIDS Memorial unveiled Steven Evans’s Songs of a Memorial (through September 6), adorning the permanent monument with 12 text-based, polychromatic, LED sculptures. To celebrate the close of the month-long celebration, DJ Lady Bunny and DJ Lina Bradford will lead a silent disco at the site—just leave an ID or a credit card for a free set of headphones.

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Dave Harper Dave Harper

W MAGAZINE: The Story Behind Silence=Death, an Icon of the LGBTQ+ Rights Movement

Few graphics are as instantly recognizable as the “Silence=Death” poster created in 1986 by the American artist Avram Finkelstein and the Silence=Death Collective. Speaking at NADA New York in early May with executive director of the NYC AIDS Memorial organization Dave Harper, Finkelstein recalled the conception of the poster and its subsequent meaning almost 40 years later.

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Dave Harper Dave Harper

NY DAILY NEWS: What to do, where to be to celebrate Pride Month 2022

The New York City AIDS Memorial is offering a Pride Weekend cool-down with a silent disco dance party featuring two LGBTQ dance floor icons, DJ Lady Bunny and DJ Lina Bradford. This free, community-focused Pride celebration will follow “Meet Me on the Dance Floor,” a storytelling event where people will share stories about the nightlife, partying, clubs, and connecting under the disco ball.

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Dave Harper Dave Harper

POZ: Do You Wanna Funk at an AIDS Memorial?

Dancing at an AIDS memorial? How could you not, when you hear upbeat anthems like “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” “It’s Raining Men,” “Why,” “All Around the World” and “Never Can Say Goodbye.” Spanning the 1970s and ’80s, these dance floor classics were part of the soundtrack for the generation of young adults first decimated by HIV and AIDS. The tracks are also the inspiration for Songs for a Memorial, the latest art installation and related programming—including a silent disco and storytelling event—at the New York City AIDS Memorial.

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Dave Harper Dave Harper

THE BODY: No, We Didn’t ‘Lose an Entire Generation’ to AIDS

“The claim that we “lost an entire generation” to AIDS erases LGBTQ older adults who are very much alive, and it erases long-term HIV survivors, regardless of sexual orientation.” The article includes mention of “REVIVAL: Survivors’ Stories,” our program with The Generations Project.

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Dave Harper Dave Harper

GAY CITY NEWS: Honoring Activism, Humor, Sex, and Love

As darkens descended on the New York City AIDS Memorial in the West Village on December 1, 10 activists who, in the words of one, have long been “thriving” with HIV paid tribute to an equal number of writers, poets, and novelists who fell to the first of the pandemics we encountered in our lives.

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Dave Harper Dave Harper

NY1: NYC marks 33rd World AIDS Day with candlelight vigils

The city commemorated the 33rd World AIDS Day with events across the five boroughs, including candlelight vigils in Brooklyn and on Staten Island. In Manhattan in the evening, the American Run for the End of AIDS and GMHC hosted a candlelight vigil at the AIDS Memorial in Greenwich Village.

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