Shroud: Mother's Voices, 1992
Civic installation, video testimony, New Haven, CT
Created for Bradley McCallum’s MFA thesis at Yale, this work responded to stories of victims of gun violence in New Haven, CT. McCallum created a series of floor length veils and video vignettes that told the stories of mothers whose children had died due to violence.
Context: The impetus for Shroud: Mothers’ Voices grew out of the complex relationship between Yale and the surrounding town residents. A New Haven Register article in early 1992 briefly described the town’s 1991 gun related deaths with perfunctory obituaries, and prompted McCallum to discover more about the lives of those deceased. The succeeding work explores the personal accounts behind the statistics on gun related deaths and succeeds in presenting a poetic construction of mourning and loss.
Description: The work includes the faces and names of mothers who have lost a child to gun violence, on ceiling to floor length veils hung throughout the gallery space as well as the name of the child who died. Adjacent to the veils is a video vignette of New Haven mothers speaking of their children, the circumstances of each child’s killing and the strength and powerlessness of motherhood. While the work tells the story of one community, the artwork addresses urban conflict on a national level.