The Gun Violence Memorial Project

Passing through the houses, the scale of the national crisis becomes immediate and intimate. Every object, every brick, and every story becomes part of a collective archive of grief, love, and memory. As families continue to contribute new objects and memories, the installations grow, turning the houses into living records of loss, resilience, and commemoration.

The best examples of this type of commemorative, living, memorial was the NAMES Project, or the AIDS quilt, which asked victims' families to contribute objects, names, and patches to a panel that could create a massive quilt. When it debuted in Washington, D.C. in 1987, it filled the entire National Mall. Something similar should happen for gun violence I thought.

Unlike epidemics that have already passed, this epidemic is at its peak— the number of deaths, the frame of what we count, continues to rise daily. We needed a framework that could house current and future stories, and adapt to the changing condition of the epidemic's form. Together with artist Hank Willis Thomas, we designed glass houses— creating enough spaces for 700 objects to be contributed (700 is the average number of deaths by firearms in America per week).

First presented at the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the project has since traveled to the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., to Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, and most recently to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit.

The future vision for the project is to build a house for every state, gathering enough objects and stories for the memorial to take root as a permanent and enduring national memorial site. 52 houses, 52 weeks, 50 states + 2 for native lands, territories, and the District of Columbia. At some future point, if fully collected, over 36,000 individual objects could be displayed, showing the wrath of the epidemic on all American households in a space of collective remembrance and resolve. However even at that scale, it would still only represent one year in American gun deaths.