Buried Alive: Andrea Bowers's Still Life of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Storage

Created in 1987 to raise public awareness about the HIV/AIDS crisis, the NAMESProject unfurled the AIDS Memorial Quilt in over forty cities across the globe between 1987 and 1996. But for sixteen consecutive years, due to a rapid decline of public funding, it resided in storage, away from public view. Andrea Bowers’s photorealistic colored pencil drawing, Still Life of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Storage (4336-4340) depicted the Quilt, not sprawled across public space, but in an Atlanta storage warehouse. In doing so, Bowers condemned the prolonged storage of the Quilt as a symptom of the public neglect toward the AIDS crisis in the 2000s. Furthermore, her original display of the drawing in the exhibition titled The Weight of Relevance in 2007 and 2008, was a self-reflexive commentary on the potential of art to serve as an activist tool. Rather than hang the drawing on a wall, she rested it on the floor and paired it with other works that memorialized the care and labor that art activism necessitates. The exhibition thus visualized that it is not the art object, but the community around it that matters. The success of Bowers’s work is testament to this fact. Although her Quilt-related drawings are currently unavailable for public view, in the wake of their exhibition, new medical treatments emerged and AIDS Memorial Quilt was digitized. Her work thus speaks to the social significance and political impact of art as activism.