San Francisco hosts largest display of AIDS Memorial Quilt

It's been 35 years since the first panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt were stitched together, sparking a national movement for action and remembrance for an epidemic that has claimed over 36 million lives around the world.

More than 3,000 Quilt panels will be on display this weekend in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the quilt's largest display anywhere in more than a decade.

Mike Smith, Co-Founder, AIDS Memorial Quilt said "The AIDS Memorial Quilt started in 1987 to commemorate the lives of people who had died of AIDS. Each of the panels in the quilt is three feet by six feet, roughly the size of a grave. And all the fabric panels are handmade by someone who knew or loved the person they're memorializing."

The Quilt is considered the largest community arts project in the world, now surpassing 50,000 individually sewn panels with more than 110,000 names stitched into its 54 tons of fabric that honors lives lost to AIDS.

The National AIDS Memorial just announced a $2.4 million grant from Gilead Sciences to launch the Quilt Southern Initiative to address the disproportionate impact of HIV in the Southern U.S.