Eight. That is how many people have died from gun violence within the United States in the past week, four of whom have died in the past two days at the time of writing this article. However, the numbers lack gravitas for those who are not personally impacted. The organizations Purpose Over Pain and Everytown for Gun Safety were determined to change that through a partnership with the MASS (Model of Architects Serving Society) Design Group with the Gun Violence Memorial Project. Inspired by the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial quilt, where each section represented a deceased AIDS patient’s personality and life, the MASS Design Group and Purpose Over Pain decided to humanize gun violence victims by incorporating personal items and constructing a visual representation of the victims’ lives. Through the process, MASS Design Group started to realize the healing capacity of creating a space for the memories of the victims, not merely as victims, but as individuals. Being involved with creating the space also became a process of healing for the victims’ families as they got the chance to once again remember their loved ones. So began the Public Memory and Memorials Lab, one of six Design Labs at MASS Design Group, with Jha D. Amazi at the helm. As Holy Cross learned during a Prior Presents residency with Amazi in March, the Lab creates memorials that focus on the question: “How can spatializing memory support healing and inspire collective action for generations to come?”
But let us cycle back. MASS Design Group is a foundation focused on the effects of architecture beyond its functional use. MASS stands for Model of Architecture Serving Society, as its team believes that architecture has the power to provide ways to confront and heal from the past while also facing the future. Any project they do is related to the dialogue between the visual structure of buildings and the social message and impact they have. For the Public Memory and Memorials Lab, Jha D Amazi and her colleagues had to consider how to present and provoke change through architecture. Why memorials then? When we think about memory, we often picture it as an incorporeal concept, like a cloudy, undefined emotion. Society makes the memory of past events tangible to the general public through three main architectural forms: museums, monuments, and memorials. Though all three spatialize public memory, they each do so in a different context and for certain types of events. Museums categorize and preserve elements of the past for education. Monuments are built to honor and celebrate accomplishments, like the Washington Monument in DC for George Washington. But memorials are unique in their purpose of encouraging reflection. They present public memory in ways that provoke the public to reconsider the history we know and reflect on what voices have slipped from that narrative despite their impact. Through such reconsideration and reflection, the process of healing begins.
In each memorial, the Public Memory and Memorials Lab uses visual elements of the design to draw attention to specific elements of the memorialized events. The Gun Violence Memorial Project presented the personal items of the victims in glass-covered white shelves shaped like houses to humanize the victims as individuals with homes and complex lives. Jha D Amazi was involved in the construction of The Embrace by the artist Hank Willis Thomas, not only as the head of the Public Memory and Memorials Lab, but as one of its principal architects. She found the project personally meaningful as it engages with the historical landscape of Boston, where she grew up. The bronze sculpture depicts the arms of Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, with Coretta’s arms supporting MLK as they intimately embraced each other when they heard the news that MLK Jr. had received the Nobel Peace Prize. The memorial emphasizes the importance of love and support in the fight against injustice and encourages viewers to reflect upon the civil rights movements in the context of the community, rather than as an achievement of one national hero. But the unity of artistic expression and message is the most apparent in The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The memorial was constructed to remember and inform the public of the scale and grim history of lynchings throughout the nation, as well as spark conversations in the counties depicted about how to acknowledge the grim and dark parts of our history. To represent the individuals who were lynched, the memorial contains jars filled with dirt from locations where lynchings took place, each jar unique in its coloration. From the ceiling hang more than eight hundred steel slabs, one for each county throughout the States where lynching happened, and each engraved with the names and dates of the victims. The memorial was sited in Montgomery, Alabama, for multiple reasons, historical and symbolic, one being that the city contains over two dozen memorials commemorating the Confederate South. By placing it on a hill overlooking the city, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice serves as a path toward peace by giving the historical pain of injustices to heal, and also as a rectification of how the racial injustices of the past are remembered.
The need for more of such memorials remains since, as the Gun Violence Memorial Project points out, we are numb even to the events happening now to realize the wounds of the communities we live in. Amazi’s visit to the college was an opportunity for the Holy Cross community to reflect on the injustices of the past and present. Her work reflects the aim of the former College president, Rev. Philip L. Boroughs, to acknowledge the past because “only with this understanding and acknowledgement can we move toward healing.” Amazi’s work is a call to action to all of us to seek justice and to remember for the sake of healing.