The Gun Violence Memorial Project is an ever-changing collection of quiet and beloved items.
Stuffed animals. Action figures.
Baseball cards. Jerseys.
Family photos. Jewelry.
Letters never sent.
The items take on a sacredness when it’s all that’s left of a life. This exhibit grows as it travels, a symbol that displays the tragic toll of the nation’s epidemic of gun violence.
Inside four glass houses are 700 transparent bricks, which represent the average number of lives taken each week in America due to gun violence.
Inside each brick is an object, a touchstone either gifted or loaned by a family who lost someone. It’s overwhelming to be surrounded by possessions held long after the person passed with a name, a year of birth, and a year of death of the person honored.
This August, the exhibit is coming to Boston. It will be on display simultaneously at City Hall, the Institute of Contemporary Art and MASS Design Group through January 2025, according to Jha D Amazi, principal at MASS Design Group and director of the Public Memory and Memorials Lab. The nonprofit design collective MASS Design Group partnered with Louis D. Brown Peace Institute in Dorchester to do the sensitive work of collecting objects. They started meeting with local families at the end of June.
“Typically all four houses have been on display in one space,” Amazi said. “And so this is the first time that we’re able to have a conversation about the impact of gun violence across a city.”
The effort first began in Chicago, launched at the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, which is where Danielle Bennett first saw the glass houses. She found the brick with her cousin’s double-dutch jump rope next to names of people she’d never met.
“It’s not like a candle at a light pole because that’s the place of the actual incident,” Bennett said, who is a project manager with the Peace Institute. “Seeing other mothers and families it’s like, ‘we’re a part of this community, we’re members of this group that we didn’t want to be a part of.’ But to see other people embracing it and loving it, it’s like we’re more than just articles, right?”
Clementina Chéry, founder, president and CEO of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, founded the Peace Institute in 1994 following the murder of her 15-year-old son Louis.
“Nobody talked about the victims,” she said. “Nobody talked about the survivors, and the only narrative was…the negative of who they are, not their humanity. “
Chéry knows how beautiful, how painful, how hard it is to release these items even just for the period that the exhibit remains in Boston.
“It’s kind of bittersweet. It’s that reminder that as survivors of gun violence, whether we survive physically or our loved ones were killed, we have the power, the obligation, and the right to make sure that our loved ones are not forgotten.”
She paused, overcome for a moment.
“I can’t put words to what it really means for this to be in our own backyard,” she said. “It’s just really beyond words.”
Amazi still remembers the first objects collected for the Gun Violence Memorial Project. They came from a family, a mother and three children who were shot and killed by her estranged husband. Among them: the newborn hat families receive at the hospital and the bracelet.
“It’s the only brick that has months with the date, because the child was not yet a year old,” Amazon said. “So everybody else has years. This is the only one where we had to put months in order for somebody to be able to understand the age of this child.”
It’s a layered process for Amazi, as she reflects on her own family’s experiences.
“I’m thinking about my mother who was shot in our home, and survived, and is walking and is abundantly healthy now,” Amazi said.
She feels a duty to her family and to her community to share this opportunity for catharsis, for healing. She hopes more local families will participate, and that once people see the houses, the objects will come.
It’s as one mother once told them: what a relief it is to have a place beyond the cemetery to remember, to honor, to love.
Those interested in contributing an object can contact Mass Design Group at participate@massdesigngroup.org and the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute at (617) 825-1917 or info@LDBpeaceinstitute.org.
For details on how to contribute an object, visit the Gun Violence Memorial Project.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2024 WBUR