Gun violence memorial filled with mementos of those lost

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: Over 125 people are killed by guns every day in the U.S.

To address that epidemic through art, the Gun Violence Memorial Project shares intimate details of lives lost.

Special correspondent Jared Bowen of GBH Boston has the story for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jared Bowen: They are the essence of home, proud structures with peaked roofs and smiling faces. Within their glass bricks, the stuff of home, a treasured ball cap, a beloved comic book hero, a triangle of toy trucks, objects all left behind when their owners lost their lives to gun violence.

Jha D Amazi, Principal, MASS Design Group: We’re able to see a little bit more into the personalities, the interests, the passions of those folks who are no longer here who have been taken due to gun violence.

And so the Gun Violence Memorial Project is a living and participatory memorial to victims of gun violence.

Jared Bowen: Architect Jha D Amazi is one of the designers of the Gun Violence Memorial Project, a traveling memorial. Right now, it’s in Boston, on view at City Hall, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and the architecture firm MASS Design Group.

It’s comprised of four houses, each with 700 glass bricks. That was the number of Americans killed by guns on a weekly basis in 2018, when the memorial was conceived.

Jha D Amazi: My most heartwarming experience of this memorial is hearing families say, come look at my house. Come look at my child. Come see what I contributed.

That level of engagement, that level of love, it has really become, as it was intended to be, a vehicle for healing.

Jared Bowen: The memorial has been populated by objects received at nationwide collection events, where the families of gun violence victims contribute personal belongings.

Lynnette Alameddine, Mother of Gun Violence Victim: Well, I chose the computer most because he was always on the computer.

Jared Bowen: Lynnette Alameddine’s only son, Ross, was killed in the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, a nine-minute rampage that left 32 people dead and more than a dozen wounded.

Next to her son’s computer mouse, the belongings of Brishell Jones, killed instantly in a 2010 drive-by shooting in Washington, D.C., that left four people dead. The memorial has brought Alameddine and Jones’ mother together.

Lynnette Alameddine: I can call anyone at any hour. And I have met a lot of people from, like, mass shootings and things. And I can just see if they’re online and say, hey are you up? Yes.

(Laughter)

Lynnette Alameddine: So that helps a lot.

Jared Bowen: Do you do that a fair amount?

Lynnette Alameddine: Yes. Oh, yes. Since we lost Ross, I haven’t slept.

Ruth Erickson, Chief Curator, Boston Institute of Contemporary Art: There’s a natural path of walking through the doorways.

Jared Bowen: Ruth Erickson is the chief curator of Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. The memorial, she says, is a way for visitors to understand gun violence victims as people, as more than the headlines and statistics that pile up annually in the United States.

Ruth Erickson: We talk with a family member about how they want those objects displayed, what they want them to convey. And very often a jersey will be folded in such a way so that the team’s logo can be shown, or a guitar pick will be angled in such a way so that one can see the make of the guitar.

So I really take each brick as a kind of portrait.

Clementina Chery, Founder, Louis D. Brown Peace Institute: They can no longer speak, so we must speak for the dead.

Jared Bowen: In 1993, Clementina Chery’s 15-year-old son, Louis, was caught in fatal crossfire in Boston. He’d been on his way to a Teens Against Gang Violence meeting. A year later, Chery founded the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute in her son’s name.

Louis’ brick includes a Christmas hat and library card for both the holiday and books he loved.

What is the experience of interacting with these homes?

Clementina Chery: It’s a mixed emotion. It’s sadness. It’s anger that this has to happen. At the same time, it’s a sense of, I want to say celebration, celebration that they are not forgotten.

Jared Bowen: Installations like this one mark an evolution in what public memorials can be. The Gun Violence Memorial Project was a collaborative effort, including architects at MASS Design Group, the artist Hank Willis Thomas, and victims’ family members.

Jha D Amazi: We are responding to calls and responding to asks of how do we tell this story in a way that allows more of us to see ourselves represented in it.

Jared Bowen: MASS Design Group is also the firm behind the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which immerses visitors in the country’s history of lynchings.

It teamed with Hank Willis Thomas for The Embrace, Boston’s memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, with a focus on their love. And the firm is now working on memorials to both Emmett Till and the peaceful protesters attacked as they began a now historic march in Selma nearly 60 years ago.

Jha D Amazi, who leads the firm’s Public Memory and Memorials Lab, says these sites should be galvanizing ones, especially for future generations, in this case wanting to see an end to gun violence.

Jha D Amazi: We continue to insert these houses in the public sphere, so that we are having a conversation about the impact of gun violence, so that people just demand more.

Jared Bowen: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jared Bowen in Boston.