The Gun Violence Memorial Project, a collaboration between MASS Design Group and the artist Hank Willis Thomas, is a wrenching experience. First seen at the Chicago Architecture Biennial in September 2019, the memorial consists of four gabled houses, each made of 700 glass bricks, with niches that allow families to display a few treasured items left behind by a loved one lost to this country’s scourge of gun violence. The memorial closed in February 2020, just as the coronavirus pandemic was beginning to ravage the country, but has reopened in Washington at the National Building Museum.
The houses have the simple geometry of a child’s picture of a house, and the objects displayed in the structures are small but potent: a bow tie that belonged to Jajuan McDowell, who lived from 2002 to 2016; a pair of sunglasses and the driver’s license of a boy who died at 17; a toy car, a wrench and a few inspirational words scrawled on a piece of paper, left by man killed in his mid-30s.
The objects were collected from people in Chicago, Las Vegas, Miami, Detroit and other cities, and the memorial is an ongoing project. The 700 bricks represent the weekly toll of gun violence in America. But if the memorial were to encompass the full, horrifying emotional toll of this tragedy, it would have to grow from four houses to a necropolis of thousands or more.
The memorial may become permanent in some form. “The installations in Chicago and Washington, D.C. are the first steps to recognizing the great need for a national, permanent memorial to gun violence victims,” MASS says on a website dedicated to the memorial.
Since the installation was seen in Chicago, the nation has suffered another epidemic that raises serious questions about this country’s ability to grapple with basic, systemic and existential questions. Covid-19 has claimed more than 500,000 lives in the United States. In 2020, gun deaths reached their highest level in two decades — nearly 20,000 from violent encounters, 24,000 from suicide.