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Great Wall Institute: The Process of the Great Wall of Los Angeles

ACT UP and AIDS Quilts

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Second vigil at the Los Angeles County/ University of Southern California Hospital. July 9, 1988. ACT UP/LA’s many successes include o Forcing the LA County Board of Supervisors to add the first AIDS ward to County/USC Medical Center. Pressuring the California Department of Corrections to address the healthcare needs of prisoners with AIDS. Getting the first compassionate release for a woman with AIDS imprisoned in the United States. Working in coalition with other ACT UP chapters around the country to expand the CDC’s AIDS definition to include opportunistic infections in women. Challenging Hollywood’s AIDS phobia at the 1991 Academy Awards because the film industry failed to address the AIDS crisis. This action helped to erode negative Hollywood stereotypes of the queer community in mainstream media. The creation of Clean Needles Now, the region’s first needle exchange program and predecessor of today’s LA Community Health Project. Los Angeles was in fact the nation’s first city to secure government funding for a needle exchange program.
ACT UP demonstrators who were angry at the federal government's response to the AIDS crisis effectively shut down the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration in Rockville, Maryland, Oct. 11, 1988. ACT UP is an international direct action advocacy group focused primarily on improving the access to and quality of AIDS healthcare services, as well as coalition building with a broad range of other activist communities. This collection contains ephemera and promotional materials from ACT UP Los Angeles. Meeting for the first time in West Hollywood in 1987, the Los Angeles chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was inspired by the activities of ACT UP New York which had been active throughout that year
In 1987, Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás founded the SILENCE=DEATH Project to support one another in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Inspired by the posters of the Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Girls (both of whose work is on view nearby), they mobilized to spread the word about the epidemic and created the now-iconic Silence=Death poster featuring the pink triangle as a reference to Nazi persecution of LGBTQ people in the 1930s and 1940s. It became the central visual symbol of AIDS activism after it was adopted by the direct action advocacy group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). HIV and AIDS remain a global health issue, with nearly 40 million people living with HIV at the end of 2017. Communities of color continue to face disproportionate effects of the disease as well as barriers to treatment. Today, ACT UP remains dedicated to their original 1987 slogan: ACT UP! FIGHT BACK! FIGHT AIDS
The Silence=Death Project, best known for its iconic political poster,[1] was the work of a six-person collective in New York City: Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Soccarás. Avram Finkelstein founded the Silence=Death project in 1987 with Jorge Socarras, Chris Lione, Charles Kreloff, Oliver Johnston, and Brian Howard during the AIDS crisis as a consciousness-raising group,[3] and as a means of mutual support. The content of their discussions quickly turned political. Inspired by posters made by the Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Girls, the group decided to create their own poster to be wheatpasted around New York City. Rejecting any photographic image as necessarily exclusionary, the group decided to use more abstract language in an attempt to reach multiple audiences. They created the Silence=Death poster using the title phrase and a pink triangle, known from its association with the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. The Silence=Death poster was also used by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) as a central image in their activist campaign against the AIDS epidemic.[8] Because of ACT UP's advocacy, the pink triangle remains synonymous with AIDS activism. In 2017, the image was reinstalled in the windows of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art[9] with a new line at the bottom: "Be Vigilant. Refuse. Resist."
Demonstrators gather in homage of the victims of AIDS, October 1987. The goal of the Quilt is to bring awareness to how massive the AIDS pandemic really is, and to bring support and healing to those affected by it. Another goal is to raise funds for community based AIDS service organizations, to increase their funding for AIDS prevention and education. As of 1996, more than $1.7 million had already been raised, and the effort continues to this day
Cynthia Greene assembles pieces of the National AIDS quilt at a West Hollywood workshop. Volunteers were given materials yesterday to create panels for the quilt that has grown six times its original size since first displayed last October in Washington, D.C., said Tom Trimm of the Names Project. The quilt memorializes those who have died of AIDS, August 16, 1988 The onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic had a significant impact on the City of West Hollywood due to the disease’s elevated infection rate among gay men which caused a devastatingly high number of deaths in the City. The City of West Hollywood was one of the first government entities to provide social services grants to local AIDS and HIV organizations.
This photograph, taken on April Fool's Day in 1989, shows minority AIDS activists marching to Oakland's City Hall to demand programs and funding for AIDS prevention and education in their communities. The disease first emerged between 1980 and 1981 in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Doctors there reported to the Federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) they had seen a handful of people suffering from Kaposi's sarcoma, an extremely rare form of cancer, or pneumocistis carinii, a rare form of pneumonia, and swollen lymph nodes. The first wave of sufferers who sought medical attention was overwhelmingly white gay men. As a result, the few politicians, journalists, and members of the public who were paying attention responded as if AIDS was a gay disease affecting the white community.