PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. — The largest piece of community folk art in the world, a tribute to victims of AIDS, is on display in Palm Beach County.
Now through Dec. 15, three different panels of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, often known as the AIDS Quilt, will be on display at three different Palm Beach County Public Library locations.
The quilt is a giant tribute to the lives of people who have died due to AIDS or AIDS-related causes.
The quilt weighs around 54 tons and was started in the 1980s during the early years of the AIDS pandemic.
The AIDS Memorial Quilt is comprised of nearly 50,000 panels containing 91,000 names of the men, women and children who lost their lives to the immune system disease.
The blocks, which make up the panels, are stitched by individuals in communities across the nation, including one librarian right in Palm Beach County.
Katrina Brockway, a librarian at the Hagen Ranch Road Branch Library, said she feels it brings tragedy a bit closer to home.
"It becomes so much more personal when you see these quilt panels and all of these people who were loved and didn't have the same opportunity to escape this," Brockway said. "So you can remember them, what they went through, and what their loved ones have gone through."
Visitors can see the quilt panels during normal library hours at the library's main branch on Summit Boulevard at the Jupiter branch and at the west Boca Raton branch.
Click here for the library's hours and more information on upcoming AIDS events at the library.