As part of our Quilts as Monuments series we revisit the story of Gert McMullin and the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the gay rights movement in San Francisco, Harvey Milk, The White Night Riots and more.

In 1985, Gert McMullin was one of the first San Franciscans to put a stitch on the AIDS Quilt, the quilt that began with one memorial square in honor of a man who had died of AIDS, and that now holds some 110,000 names. The quilt is made up of some 50,000 panels, each 3x6 feet, the size of a grave. It weighs 60 tons. End to end, it would stretch out more than 50 miles.

Gert never planned it this way, but over the decades she has become the keeper of the quilt and has stewarded it, repaired it, tended it, traveled with it and conserved it for some 33 years now.

In 2020, when COVID-19 hit, Gert was one of the first Bay Area citizens to begin sewing masks—PPE for nurses and health care workers who were lacking proper protection—masks she made from fabric left over from the AIDS Quilt. The comfort, outrage and honoring of an earlier pandemic being used to protect people from a new one.

In January of 2020, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, now part of the National AIDS Memorial, returned home to the Bay Area after 16 years in Atlanta. It took six 52-foot semis to get it there. The extensive AIDS archive, which Gert gathered, collected and protected since its earliest days, is now part of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

This episode features interviews with LGBT rights activist Cleve Jones who worked with Harvey Milk and conceived of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and John Cunningham, executive director of the National AIDS Memorial.

Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. Mixed by Jim McKee. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of Radiotopia from PRX.

Olivia Wilde. Actor. Director. Producer. Olivia comes from a long line of journalists, a British father and an American mother, who have made groundbreaking investigative documentaries. The late writer Christopher Hitchens, a friend of the family, was her babysitter. She grew up in a world of words, a world of stories, a world of speaking truth to power. She chose her stage name in honor of Oscar Wilde, a writer she admires.

Olivia starred in dozens of TV shows and movies before directing her first feature in 2019, the raunchy, high-stakes, hilarious, high school comedy, Booksmart.

Her latest movie, The Invite, is a tight ensemble film, which she both directs and acts in alongside Penelope Cruz, Edward Norton and Seth Rogen.

The Invite was a smash hit at the Sundance Film Festival in January — the last one in Park City, Utah — and set off one of those legendary bidding wars you hear about like Sex, Lies, and Videotape did back in the day.

In April The Invite opened the San Francisco Film Festival at the newly renovated historic Castro Theatre and Olivia came to see us in the studios of KQED just before the screening to talk about the movie and her path as a filmmaker.

Perhaps it was the AIDS Quilt that redefined what a monument could look like and who could create it. Or maybe it was the quilters of Gee's Bend or the Freedom Quilting Circle in Alabama, taking the scraps of their lives — old military camo uniforms, overalls, flour sacks — honoring the living and the dead. Quilts as monuments, memorials, large and small, stretch far back into our American story.

Monuments are a contentious issue these days in the South and beyond. But right now, in Alabama, the Sew Their Names Project — some 20 quilters, a reverend, and a judge — are bringing unlikely collaborations together to embroider the names of hundreds of forgotten people who were once enslaved. Creating quilts that record and tell.

Today The Kitchen Sisters, together with the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, present: Quilts as Monuments: Sew Their Names