We are gathered here today to remember Sylvia. A person whose efforts have to this day continued to impact the communities to which she belonged and served.

We met Sylvia at the Christopher Street piers, where little traces of her live on - a street name here, a poster there. But information was missing. We knew her name, but nothing about her story, her legacy, her meaning.

In our search to get to know Sylvia, we began to fill in these gaps. Too many stories go overlooked, like Sylvia’s. We wanted to develop a framework to assist in the uncovering of erased stories, and to reclaim public memorialization.

The Sylvia Rivera Quilt Project is a framework to memorialise LGBTQ+ histories and peoples, with Sylvia herself being one of them.


The final product is a quilt, a community-produced form of memorialisation that honours people and events and their complex natures. There is a move away from reductive, biased, or idealised representation that is often characteristic of memorials. Memorials lack accountability. The quilt offers a platform to convey a complex narrative, accommodating multiple concepts and perspectives. Rather than focusing only on the idolisation or tragedy of an event, the quilt can encompass nuance, multiple agents, stakeholders, perpetrators. The quilt embodies the cause-and-effect nature of people and their relationships.


Quilting also has a history of being used for commemoration. Women coming together to quilt is a long-held tradition and quilting parties would be held where women came together to create a single quilt. Quilting became a community activity that created a space for conversation and collaboration.

Inspired by the AIDS Memorial Quilt project, the Sylvia Rivera Quilt Project invites different perspectives, voices, takes, scales to coexist in honour and memory.

The symbol of the quilt embodies similar ideas as Sylvia herself. She was an individual who often adopted the role of a maternal figure, caring for the homeless and LGBTQ+ communities. In her own way, Sylvia created community spaces.

The creation of the quilt is guided by our manual which was based off our process of creating our quilt from start to end with Sylvia as our chosen subject.

Embodiment is defined as the knowledge that resides in the body but also knowledge that is gained through the body.

Under this premise, we developed a ritual related to Sylvia to connect, understand, embody her.

The ritual emphasises the importance of commitment and routine and learning through sustained exposure.

Through visiting sites and performing acts, we could better understand the spatial and societal conditions in which Sylvia lived.

Step Two: Knowledge

Embodiment naturally catalysed a continuous gathering of research and information that was performed simultaneously alongside the ritual. Through scavenging a wide range of and sometimes obscure sources, we accumulated a collection of information about Sylvia.

Step Three: Perspective

This information was then filtered through our subjective lenses. Our research led us to understand Sylvia and many of the injustices inflicted upon her by the city- both directly and indirectly. Her life was often a back and forth with the city.

As we developed a mind map, drawing connections between city decision making and Sylvia, we were led to a critique: Sylvia Rivera deserves an apology from the city.

Step Four: Detail

Each panel is a voice, each quilt is a choir. Together, we crafted four panels that come together. While each 4 x 4 panel illustrates one portion of her story, the larger quilt speaks to her whole life. Looking at her story through the lens of policy, accountability, and memorialisation, we told our story of Sylvia as deserving of an apology from decision-makers.

The red line of fate tracks Sylvia's chronological trajectory, a series of decisions and events and the effects that followed. Interwoven with her lifeline are the blue threads of law, policy, authority that affected her. The consequences of decisions made by the city and higher authorities in the past still trickle down into Sylvia's life. Seemingly linear timelines tangle together. Sylvia also coexisted with different figures throughout her life and the interwoven threads speak to the impact of these relationships on her life. 

The sites composing Sylvia's life take on a minimal form as it was Sylvia who bypassed the architectural and urban constraints set upon her by the city to craft communities and safe spaces for her and the people around her.

The decision to include more than one site is reflective of the fugitivity Sylvia underwent in her life-- she was constantly having to move, adapt, reconstruct. Her fluidity is seen in the looseness of her thread, juxtaposed against the staticness of the buildings she occupied. The engagement with the sites are more often a point of touch and go while her relationships with people took on a more signficant nature.

Out of all the sites, the pier - where we started this project, where we met her, and where her life was most entangled - takes on a more fluid nature and seems to defy time. Of all the sites, it is the most consistent in Sylvia's life until the city's thread intervenes.

Through constructing the quilt, it bridged the gap between knowledge and craft. It was an act of learning while doing and forming richer connections to our research,  experiences, and Sylvia.

Step Five: Archive

The information gathered on Sylvia was tagged by themes, examples include activism, homophobia, homelessness, police brutality.

The tags are used to organise the panels thematically, so the database is easier to navigate.

Step Six: Mobility

Once a year on July 2, Sylvia’s birthday, a selection of panels will be assembled into a quilt on the Christopher St piers for public viewing. The quilt is never assembled the same way twice. This is an act of reclamation.

Throughout the rest of the year, the panels remain accessible and available for assembly and display. Different panels can be exhibited as quilts on different sites throughout the year - by request. Much as the architecture of the city shaped Sylvia, implementing these quilts in-situ imbues the quilts with further meaning and allows for the reclamation of public spaces.

The framework encompasses a voluntary curatorial aspect which alongside the panel system enables the quilt to exist as a dynamic, non-fixed, fluid assemblage.

Through display, we reframe what memorialisation looks like in the public sphere and redefine canonical definitions of memorialisation. Who contributes? What is missing? What changes?

The overarching critique— memorials lack accountability. Sylvia does not exist in a vacuum. The city, its laws, its policies impacted Sylvia’s trajectory and Sylvia’s choices also shaped the city.

Sylvia is as much an agent in her own life as decision-makers were.

Our quilt - dedicated to her - fills in gaps we identified in how she has been memorialised. Authorities have continually displaced and erased the stories and impact of marginalised communities to which she belongs.

This lack of acknowledgement is not limited to Sylvia but is a recurring pattern seen across time.