Three memorial houses have been placed on display all over Boston as a part of the Gun Violence Memorial Project. These houses have been displaying the personal items of gun violence victims throughout the city to show the true impact of gun violence on a personal level. One house is on display at Boston City Hall, another at the MASS Design Group Gallery, and two more at The Institute of Contemporary Art.
The memorial houses are made of glass and wood to resemble a brick facade, creating a frame encased in glass. These glass bricks hold the personal items of victims of gun violence. The project is a traveling exhibit created to address the lack of a national memorial for gun violence victims. The Gun Violence Memorial Project first visited Chicago in 2019 and then had an exhibition in Washington, D.C. in 2021.
This project was created in 2018 by the MASS Design Group, designed by artist Hank Willis Thomas and the Songha & Company. Thomas and the MASS Design Group also worked on “The Embrace” statue near the Smith Residence Hall on the Boston Common.
The Project also collaborated with gun violence prevention organizations Purpose Over Pain, based in Chicago, and Everytown for Gun Safety, which has a headquarters in New York. The memorial partnered with the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute for the Boston exhibition.
These organizations helped collect donated personal items and put on “collection events,” where family members of victims had the chance to donate to the memorial. The MASS Design Group will hold two more collection events on November 15th and 16th at their Boston office.
This project began when MASS Design Group was approached by two mothers from Chicago, Pamela Bosley and Annette Nance-Holt, the co-founders of Purpose Over Pain. Bosley and Nance-Holt, both of whom lost their sons to gun violence, urged the group to make a memorial for victims of gun violence. This would start the collaboration between the two groups for this project.
The memorial project aims to visualize the magnitude of the loss caused by gun violence.
The memorial houses are made up of 700 glass bricks, representing the number of people in the U.S. killed by guns each week when the project was created in 2018. Now, in 2024, that number has risen to more than 840, according to Everytown for Gun Safety.
Each house contains the names and personal belongings of gun violence victims. These items range from hats to action figures to collectible baseball cards that belonged to each of the victims. Through these items, you are connected to the victims.
“The symbolism of the house is really sort of meant to represent the closeness of the issue to so many people,” said Maggie Stern, director of the advocacy team at the MASS Design Group and project manager of the Gun Violence Memorial Project. “44% of Americans know someone who’s been shot. The individual bricks are meant to speak to the personality and the interests of the people who have been taken due to gun violence.”
The houses’ locations also matter, with one of them being placed in the lobby of Boston’s City Hall. To have a memorial for gun violence victims in a place of legislation and where change is made allows many people to witness it.
People who come in to renew their licenses or get married run into the memorial without anticipating it.
With the houses being spread across the city, they spread their message and engage in discussion across its many different communities. The memorial brings the issue of gun violence to Boston’s doorstep, and it allows people to put a face on this problem.
Pamela Bosely, one of the project’s founding partners, was quoted on the project’s website as saying, “You hear those numbers all the time, but you never tie names to them,” Bosely said. “I wanted you to see who my son was.”
That idea of humanizing the statistics is very prevalent in the project. To put a face and a name to a number is powerful, and the project has achieved that with this memorial.
The Gun Violence Memorial Project started the exhibition in Boston in August of this year. The project will be displayed at City Hall, the ICA and the MASS Design Group’s gallery until Jan. 20, 2025.
