Intervention 1: School Shootings

    For my intervention project, I have decided to focus on the issue of school shootings. Whenever it occurs it causes a fear of safety in people whether or not they personally dealt with a situation like it. It leads to potential harm or death to the people within the vicinity of the school. Survivors and families of the deceased are left with scars from the tragedy. It is during these times that sharing their stories is crucial to spreading awareness of the harm of guns. In The Art of Activism it is stated “while we each have our own individual story, what we share is a transformative process that began with something deeply personal, emotional, and experiential” (18). While I personally and fortunately have never experienced a school shooting, I have experienced having my high school be on lockdown due to someone wielding a gun in the vicinity of a different school in 2019. In that situation, I felt fear for my safety, the same emotion the people in the recent Michigan State University shooting must have felt. 

    It is due to the continuation of school shootings occurring throughout the United States that has inspired me to create this intervention. In The Art of Activism it is stated “as the writer Jorge Luis Borges summarized at the end of his life: ‘The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man's memory’” (25). Death is a natural occurrence in life. However, sometimes life is taken away from us too soon before we even get the chance to experience the world in full. This is what is snatched away from the students who die as a result of school shootings. They are people who have barely explored the world and have dreams they wish to pursue but no longer can. It is these deceased students that I wish to honor who they were and what they have become. My intervention is creating artwork for the students that have died during school shootings. Furthermore, I will create a second artwork of the students as skeletons as a second layer. Therefore, the first layer will show them alive and the second layer will show them long dead. This is to represent that their lives have been stolen from them. I want this to impact people to make them realize that we need to stand up to force a change so these school shootings have less of a probability of occurring. I want the intervention to push for a change for stricter gun laws to decrease the number of deaths by guns. 

The following artwork is of ten-year-old Rojelio Torres, one of 19 students and 2 adults that died in a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on May 24, 2022.

Skull (Left) and Rojelio Torres (Right)

Reference: https://twitter.com/ksatnews/status/1529517341289205761?s=20 and https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2F6-brains.myshopify.com%2Fproducts%2F5-7-year-old-uncut-pediatric-child-skull&psig=AOvVaw3PQP44VLLCcbRHInxFWVEY&ust=1677801642866000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CA8QjRxqFwoTCIjr8Kn4u_0CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD