Public art installation honoring victims still draws a crowd

Blair Miller and her four young children had often driven past Highland Park’s public art installation honoring the victims of the July 4 mass shooting, but it was weeks before they stopped to take it in.

Finally, a few days before the kids started school in mid-August, the family came to the Central Avenue pavilion whose pillars are wrapped in bright orange yarn, the color adopted by the anti-gun violence movement. Thousands of luggage tags bearing handwritten messages of hope, sadness and defiance dangled from the pillars and from easels holding portraits of the seven people killed.

“Sending love! Be strong!” read one typical dispatch, written in purple ink.

Miller’s kids got to work penning their own messages. The family had been at the parade that came under fire, Miller said, and three of her children attend the same Highland Park elementary school as Cooper Roberts, the 8-year-old shot and paralyzed that day.

“My hope is this stays up for a very long time,” Miller said. “When you see all of the notecards people have written and all of the items they’ve brought, it certainly doesn’t make anything OK, but it’s comforting to know how much love there is, especially in a time of grief and heartbreak.”

But impromptu memorials tend to have a short life — the city of Uvalde, Texas, removed one six weeks after the massacre at Robb Elementary School — and some in Highland Park told the Tribune that the project, located in the heart of the suburb’s downtown, has been there long enough.

“The memorial is not a place to keep coming back to … for arts and crafts,” said one resident who fled gunfire at the parade. “It is long past time to take it down.”

City Manager Ghida Neukirch said there’s no plan to remove the installation, but because some residents find it triggering, officials want to see it downsized.

“The request is if they could consider how they could scale back that artwork so it’s not so visible,” she said. “We still want to create a place where people can come and gather and reflect and mourn and remember, but not to make it so incredibly visible that it’s uncomfortable to people.”

Such is the span of opinion regarding this striking installation, which began with one artist’s vision before morphing into a life of its own.

Jacqueline von Edelberg, who moved to Highland Park a year ago, had done several public art projects highlighting the toll of gun violence before it struck her new hometown. The basic model is the same: She and her collaborators tie strips of fabric to suspended ropes and wrap trees and posts in yarn to create colorful scenes infused with meaning.

Her installations protesting violence, which she has assembled in Chicago neighborhoods and on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol, feature the color orange, which hunters wear in the woods to remain safe from gunfire. Activists adopted it for their cause after Chicago teen Hadiya Pendleton was shot to death in 2013.

Highland Park’s mass shootings inspired several instant memorials of photos, candles and stuffed animals, but von Edelberg said she wanted to add something that would allow people to feel productive in the face of tragedy.

“I tied a ball of orange yarn to each one of the posts in the pavilion,” she said. “As people came, I just asked if they wanted to wrap a pillar and people were like, ‘Yes, yes, I do. I would like to do that.’ And a lot of people stayed for five minutes, five hours, five days, and they wrapped everything in sight.”

With the help of community members and visitors, the installation grew ever larger, adding a blizzard of orange fabric strips, huge cards inscribed with dozens of signatures and thousands of message-bearing luggage tags. One recent afternoon, Lynn Orman Weiss, of Skokie, who has volunteered to tend the installation, arrived with buckets of fresh flowers to replace those that had wilted.

She said the pavilion has become a center of unity, with near-nightly music performances, giveaways of donated cookies and numerous visitors who, like her, who have made a ritual of preserving the memorial.

“It just evolved,” she said. “Obviously the vision was to bring hope, to bring transformation from tragedy, and that’s exactly what it has done.”

Paul Farber of Monument Lab, a public art and history studio in Philadelphia, said the Highland Park memorial is akin to other public art projects that have addressed issues such as AIDS and climate change.

As with the Highland Park installation, which features a QR code that connects smartphone users with the congressional switchboard, Farber said the idea behind these pieces is to stir action, not just reflection.

“They’re part of a growing conversation among artists and organizers who are ensuring that the acts of memory and advocacy go together,” he said.

Chicago artist Scheherazade Tillet has worked on similar projects in the city, including a “takeover” of Douglass Park to memorialize the 2012 police killing of Rekia Boyd. Mourners draped yellow ribbons affixed with personal messages over tree limbs, and Tillet said some of those ribbons are still there four years later.

She said that like any memorial, the takeover project is meant to ensure that what happened in the park is not forgotten.

“To go to spaces and not know (what took place there), this kind of erasure adds a different level of trauma,” she said. “It’s almost like a betrayal to the community.”

Locals who shared their opinions with the Tribune generally appreciated the Highland Park installation, though some were concerned about saving the messages (von Edelberg said she plans to digitize them). Sonya Cohen said she visits almost every day, and occasionally leaves a message of her own.

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“Most times, I stare at the faces of my neighbors who were murdered and I try to connect with them,” she said. “I find it incredibly comforting but also meaningful and important.”

Von Edelberg said she’s still talking with the city about the installation’s future and will follow its direction once the decision is made. Highland Park officials say they ultimately aim to build a permanent memorial, but that work has yet to begin.

In the meantime, visitors to the pavilion keep coming.

On a recent afternoon, a lone woman lingered over a poem written on poster board. Wearing an “H.P Strong” bracelet on one wrist and two orange bracelets on the other, the woman, who declined to give her name, said the installation is helping her process what happened in her hometown.

“I couldn’t grasp it all, so the first thing I did was write and note and put it up there,” she said. “It has given me a chance to start healing step by step. I come back to it, I grow a little more.”

jkeilman@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @JohnKeilman