"Two years ago, Cleve Jones, a San Francisco activist, walked out to his backyard carrying some stencils, a piece of dark-gray cloth and some spray paint," staff writer Kent Williams recounts in a City Notes column. "When he was finished, Jones had made a memorial panel to his friend Marvin Feldman, who had died of AIDS four months earlier." The effort snowballed, to where it became the 9,000-plus panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which if gathered in one place would stretch the length of eight football fields. Williams' item previews a display of 200 panels, mostly from Wisconsin, at the UW Field House. Twenty years later, the AIDS Memorial Quilt now numbers more than 40,000 panels.
AIDS quilt lays it all out
From the Isthmus archives, April 7, 1989