Four panels of the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt will be displayed Friday and Saturday at Chippewa Middle School.
The 12-by-12 panels make up a small portion of the quilt, which has about 44,000 panels made by the friends and family of people who have died of AIDS.
The plan for a commemorative quilt arose when activists taped the names of AIDS casualties to the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building in 1985, project officials said.
By 1996 the quilt had become so large it covered the National Mall during a memorial.
Susan Pekoe, an 8th-grade social studies teacher who has been at Chippewa School for 30 years, learned about the quilt after a friend made a panel for her brother, Chris Akin, in 1996, she said.
Sections of the quilt have been displayed at Chippewa every year since 1997, Pekoe said.
“The quilt also affects peoples’ attitudes on the disease and shows the humanity behind the statistics,” Pekoe said. “People really put their hearts into them,” often silk-screening photographs onto the cloth panels.
The public is invited to look at the quilt in the school library, 123 8th Ave., from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday and 10 a.m. to noon Saturday.