South Texas native Sandeigh Kennedy returns with the next iteration of her Gun Violence Memorial series—ECHOES - a multimedia installation using personal objects to mark mass shootings across the U.S.

"This work is about reckoning. It’s about making visible the lives we've learned to scroll past, the statistics we no longer stop to read. I started this memorial in 2019 after the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton—laying out 258 pairs of black-painted shoes in my hometown of New Braunfels. Since then, the number has grown, the silence has deepened, and my need to respond has only sharpened. The piece was installed again in January of 2024 at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, TX and included 657 pairs of shoes in memory of the more than 600 mass shootings that occurred in the United States in 2023.

“In this installation, I chose shoes—imperfect, personal, intimate. Human. Each one stands in for multiple lives lost. Some viewers cry. Some light candles. Some just stand and stare. My hope is that we can see these stats not as numbers on a screen, but as pieces of our collective humanity. We’ve become so desensitized to mass shootings in America, my heart was to shift perspective with a common item most of us own and recognize. I want to make space for conversation around this uniquely American epidemic. Whatever your feelings might be about guns and access to them in general, I believe we can all agree we have a long way to go to solve this complex issue. The first step is to face it.”