Faces Not Forgotten

Deadly shootings take place daily in the United States. Almost 50,000 Americans die every year to gun-induced injuries. Given this extreme violence rate and the U.S.’s lax gun regulation policy, Christine Ilewski created the Faces Not Forgotten project in 2009 when her friend Larry Rosebaugh died at the hands of a firearm. With Faces Not Forgotten, Ilewski asks the question: For how long can we remember the names of the thousands of children who die to gun violence? Can an we recall their faces? We seem to accept these (preventable) routine deaths as a general public. For how long must we accept these deaths before acting?

Faces Not Forgotten paints the portraits of children, aged 20 and under, who have died as the result of gun violence, matching anonymous statistics to the specific faces they represent. To give comfort to the families of young gun violence victims, artists with the Faces Not Forgotten project hand-paint a portrait for each individual child lost to guns. The “Face” of each child is donated to the family, allowing them to grieve with the support of art. After the painting’s production and donation, an image of the original portrait is superimposed over an image of a vintage handkerchief and printed on canvas panels with grommets in the corners. These panels are tied together with black ribbon in sets of eight portraits, culminating in large-scale quilts, representing those eight children that have died from gun violence. These quilts are exhibited to the public to shift perception of the causes of gun violence and ignite change within local communities, urging the community to advocate for tighter gun legislation, as is so in nearly every other country globally (hence their substantially lower rates of gun violence compared to the U.S.). Additionally, Faces Not Forgotten features oral histories from family members of those memorialized by the quilt project to accompany the quilt installations, making the painful nation-wide issue impossible to ignore.

Each child we lose has a story. Each child has a face that won’t be forgotten.