CONVERGE: MetroHealth

CONVERGE  Venue Name: Cleveland MetroHealth

Venue Location: MetroHealth | Rammelkamp Atrium & Outpatient Plaza Atrium |2500 MetroHealth Drive, Cleveland OH 44109

Additional Venue Information: Park in the visitor’s garage on MetroHealth Drive, across from the towers –  bring your parking ticket in for validation. Enter through the revolving doors under the towers and the front desk staff can direct you to the Rammelkamp Atrium and the Outpatient Plaza Atrium (near our Pharmacy)

CONVEGE Exhibition Dates: August 26 – October 16

National AIDS Quilt Exhibition Dates: September 20 – October 8

Gallery Hours: 8:00am – 8:00pm Daily

Venue Website: 2021 AIDS Memorial Quilt Exhibition | The MetroHealth System

Venue Exhibiting Artists: Mark Badzik, Paxton Enstad, Gene Epstein, William Martin Jean, Gil Kudrin, Tracey Lind, Anthony Trausch

Special Venue Events:

Make a Mini Quilt Piece:

• Saturday, September 25 | 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. or 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
• Wednesday, September 29 | 12:00 – 2:00 p.m. or 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
• Thursday, October 7 | 4:00 – 6:00 p.m.

MetroHealth Artist Reception | Thursday, October 7 | 6:30 – 8:00pm

From Metro: In order to maintain social distance and avoid a large crowd hanging out for a long time, in 2021 we are opting to host several smaller, shorter “mini” panel-making workshops where participants can create a one-foot square block that will be sewn in to a traditional 3 by 6-foot community AIDS Quilt panel representing Greater Cleveland. These smaller workshops, creating smaller Quilt pieces that will be sewn together into one, unified panel, will allow more people to participate and can include not just those who lost a loved one to AIDS-related illness, but also those who care about the HIV community in Cleveland.

If you want to be a part of the Quilt but don’t know the first thing about sewing or design, don’t worry. We have talented seamsters, artists with design savvy, and other caring volunteers to guide you through the process. We provide everything you’ll need – materials, sewing machines, sewing folks, and a supportive environment. All you have to bring is yourself and ideas of how you might want your mini Quilt piece to look.

Volunteer Opportunities:

• Creative Volunteer: If you are a person who sews, an artist, or are simply a creative, caring person, Metro need you! Please consider volunteering for our mini panel-making workshops.
• Sitting Volunteer: The AIDS Quilt is an irreplaceable work of art and needs to be treated with care and carefully looked after during it’s time at MetroHealth. Metro needs volunteers to come to MetroHealth for “Quilt-sitting” in 2-hour shifts. Please consider supporting HIV awareness by giving your time. Parking validation provided and our gratitude.
• CLICK HERE TO VOLUNTEER!

Group Visits Opportunities:

Visiting the Quilt can be a powerful experience, especially for young people. Please contact Jen McMillen Smith at jmsmith@metrohealth.org or 216-778-4051 if you are interested in planning a group visit to the Quilt. We can arrange a short talk with a person who made a Quilt panel and/or a person living with HIV. Groups hosted in the past include middle school students from Urban Community School, Cleveland Heights High GSA students, a group of young volunteers with Planned Parenthood, and a LGBT Teen Group.

CONVERGE Venue Statement:

On a crisp November day in 1985, activist Cleve Jones learned that over 1,000 San Franciscan lives had been snuffed out due to AIDS related illness. Reeling from the profound loss, he implored his fellow activists of the annual candlelight march he had been organizing since the assassination of the out gay San Francisco Supervisor, Harvey Milk, to write the names of loved ones lost to HIV/AIDS. The marchers then hung the placards, all taped together, on the San Francisco federal building, creating a makeshift, patchwork quilt. Thus, the AIDS Quilt was conceived.

History has a nasty habit of benefitting the most powerful, leaving the names and stories of those with less access behind, trampled beneath the foot of collective memory, gone, and forgotten. The AIDS Memorial Quilt is a bastion for those who would otherwise be un-remembered, LGBTQ people and the community that loved them.

At MetroHealth, the patients we serve, newly diagnosed and long-term survivors, people who have seen the ebb and flow of this epidemic, have lost hundreds of loved ones since the beginning. In 2019, even with monumental advancements in treatment and care, 370 Ohioans died to HIV/AIDS related illness1. Such profound loss should never be wilted to invisibility.

MetroHealth has a long history of providing affirming health care to the LGBTQ community. Our HIV clinic started in 1991 and currently serves over 1,800 people with HIV. In addition, The MetroHealth Pride Network, which began as the Pride Clinic in 2007, was the first of its kind in Cleveland to provide healthcare services specifically to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, non-binary, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI+) community.

Since 2009, MetroHealth’s HIV clinic staff has found it intensely important to not only display the Quilt, but create opportunities for the Greater Cleveland community to contribute to it as well. Since the first showing at MetroHealth, a total of 50 new panels have been created during MetroHealth’s panel-making workshops, lead by local sewing experts, artists and passionate volunteers, to expand the prevailing poignant message that our people will not be forgotten; they were here and still live on in the lives they touched. The Quilt has been displayed every-other year in MetroHealth’s Rammelkamp Atrium, for public viewing.

MetroHealth’s Center for Arts in Health is proud to partner with the Artist Archive of the Western Reserve to present the Converge exhibition featuring LGBTQ artists of our community. It can be viewed in the Arts in Health Gallery near the Office of Patient Experience at MetroHealth Medical Center, Main Campus.

Jennifer McMillen Smith, Social Work Specialist at MetroHealth & coordinator of MetroHealth’s AIDS Quilt displays.
Writing contribution credit to AKeem Rollins 1 Ohio Department of Health HIV Surveillance Annual Report, 2019