School News: Memorializing COVID-19 Victims

Summer 2021

Madeleine Fugate, an eighth grade student at The Buckley School (CA), has been sewing since she was 5. She used to patch up holes in her clothing and sew miniature outfits for her stuffed animals, but now she spends much of her time sewing panels for a COVID Memorial Quilt she started as part of a Community Action Project that began in her seventh grade history class. The Community Action Project’s theme was “Young Changemakers in a COVID-19 World.” Inspired by stories her mother shared about her work in the 1980s on the AIDS Memorial Quilt honoring those who died of HIV and AIDS, Fugate started the COVID Memorial Quilt in April 2020 to honor and remember all those who have died of the disease. “They aren't just numbers—they are real people who had lives, jobs, families and friends, a pet—and they deserve to be remembered,” Fugate says in a January 2021 interview in People magazine.
 
Like the AIDS Memorial Quilt project, people from all over the world submit handmade memorial squares and stories about their loved ones to Fugate’s P.O. box. Each memorial square measures 8 inches by 8 inches, which she chose because the number eight is the symbol of infinity. “The physical person might be gone, but their energy lives on forever,” she says. Each panel of the COVID Memorial Quilt holds 25 memorial squares and, when completed, becomes one large 48-inch by 48-inch square. So far, Fugate has constructed 12 panels.
 
The COVID Memorial Quilt will be displayed publicly as a living memorial so people can come together to grieve and heal. Two panels are already on display at the California Science Center in Los Angeles in a COVID-19-themed exhibit for the next 18 months. More panels will be displayed in Nebraska, Florida, and New York in the late summer and fall.
 
Fugate has inspired other students. A class at Carver Middle High School in Massachusetts made 29 squares. She spoke with them via Zoom about her process, and now the school has its own panel. The Glen Allen High School National Art Honor Society in Virginia also presented Fugate with more than 35 handmade memorial squares. She plans to continue making panels as long as people continue to send the squares.
 
Photos of the memorial squares and their stories as well as information about how to submit are posted on her website, covidquilt2020.com.

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Madeleine Fugate sews a quilt in her home.
 

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