A community art project regarding the effects of violence and the healing power of public discourse.
The piece featured audio testimony by city residents who have lost loved ones to violence intercut with the remorseful stories of prisoners now serving time for such acts at the Missouri State Correctional Facility in Potosi. Accompanying each speaker’s voice were video images of their hands projected onto the library’s southern façade. The piece was originally to be projected onto the eastern façade of the city’s historic old courthouse, situated in the center of the national park downtown that includes the Gateway Arch. The courthouse, where the slave Dred Scott sued for his freedom in 1846, is the city’s most historically powerful building, but last-minute controversy over the content of that piece caused the switch to the library.
Created in collaboration with faculty and students from the Schools of Architecture and Art at the Washington University in St. Louis.