The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt is coming home to Scotland

The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt will be displayed in full in Scotland for the first time this autumn, going on show at Tramway in Glasgow from 12 September to 4 October, with free admission throughout and a programme of talks, screenings and workshops running alongside it.

The exhibition will place the Quilt in the company of archival material tracing its Scottish history, together with the documentary film There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, and it arrives in a city whose own experience of the epidemic has rarely been given this much room.

What the Quilt is

The UK Quilt remembers more than 600 people who died of HIV and AIDS in this country, and it belongs to what is generally reckoned to be the largest community art project in the world, begun in San Francisco in 1985 by the activist Cleve Jones as a way of naming the dead at a moment when very few institutions were willing to.

Its 335 panels were each made by someone who knew and loved the person being remembered, which is why they carry photographs, handwriting, jokes, fabric taken from clothing and messages that were never intended for a gallery wall, and why the effect of the whole thing is so resolutely individual rather than statistical.

Most panels measure three feet by six feet, stitched together into blocks of twelve feet square, and the dimensions were chosen deliberately, since a single panel is roughly the size of a grave plot. During the worst years of the crisis, when stigma meant that a great many people died without being publicly mourned at all, laying the Quilt out in a civic space was both an act of grief and an argument.

Why Scotland matters to it

The UK collection was coordinated from Scotland in the late 1980s by the activist ally Ian Van Tillo, and it was kept in Leith from 1989 and through the following decade, functioning during that period as a resource for bereavement, education and organising rather than as a heritage object.

Van Tillo has described the exhibition as the Quilt "coming home to Scotland", and has said that its early years in Leith helped people make sense of loss while restoring some humanity to individuals whom the government and the press of the day were content to characterise as perverts and social pariahs. His case for showing it now is not primarily a historical one: he argues that the Quilt remains a living thing, and that no more of this history should be permitted to vanish.

Seven UK HIV support charities came together in 2014 to form the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt Partnership, which conserves the collection and arranges its display. The Glasgow run follows the Quilt's appearance at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in June 2025, where close to 70,000 people saw it across five days.

What else is on

Cleve Jones will appear in conversation with Van Tillo and with Siobhán Lanigan, who chairs the Quilt Partnership, in what is likely to be the closest thing the season has to a summit between the project's origins and its long Scottish afterlife.

The wider programme includes a discussion of John Binnie's 1987 play Killing Me Softly, a screening of Choose Life: Edinburgh's Battle Against AIDS, and a day of events from the LGBT heritage organisation OurStory Scotland examining Glasgow's own HIV and AIDS history.

ACT UP will host events in both Edinburgh and Glasgow looking at its work, among them film screenings, a talk and a workshop led by the activist Dan Glass, while creative textile workshops at Tramway will let visitors approach the Quilt's history through the medium it was made in. A fundraiser at The Vic & Assembly on 24 September will raise money towards future displays.

The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt is at Tramway, Glasgow, from 12 September to 4 October 2026. Admission is free. Further details at aidsquiltuk.org.