AIDS Memorial Quilt display at Channing Peake

Working with the Santa Barbara County Office of Arts and Culture, Quilt Project Gold Coast (QPGC), makers of the AIDS Memorial Quilt of the Gold Coast covering Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, announced that it will display a dozen panels of local Quilts in the Channing Peake Gallery of the Santa Barbara County Administration Building, located at 105 East Anapamu Street in Santa Barbara, from August 20 to September 15 to remember those lost to AIDS.

The Quilt panels will commemorate Santa Barbara County and other area residents who died from AIDS. The display will start the week of Santa Barbara’s Pride Festival on August 24.

“We are showing these Quilts to remember our friends and family, who will not be able to attend this year’s festival,” said QPGC Board president Keith Coffman-Grey. He added that there is no admission fee to the Channing Peake Gallery, where the Quilts and a history of the local project will be on display.

The twelve panels will include Mitch Kincannon, a Santa Barbara AIDS activist; UCSB professor David Broder; and area resident Ruben Varela. This past spring the Kincannon Quilt was displayed at the district office of Rep. Salud Carbajal (pictured).

Quilt Project Gold Coast is a Santa Barbara-based nonprofit serving the communities of Ventura and Santa Barbara County, and since its founding in 2018 has produced over three dozen panels for display in the Gold Coast. In addition to Quilt displays, QPGC offers a speakers bureau on local AIDS history and living with the disease, as well as booths at local festivals and health fairs, and a quarterly newsletter, The Stitch’n Times. 

QPGC’s Halloween Ghost Ship Dinner Cruise fundraiser will take place Friday, October 25, and funds most of the nonprofit’s activities each year. For tickets, newsletter sign-ups or more information, including getting involved, please visit www.quiltprojectgoldcoast.org, or call 805-569-0561.