Zarinah Lomax stands beside portraits she commissioned, mostly of young people who died from gunfire. “The purpose is not to make people cry,” Lomax says. “It is for families and for people who have gone through this to know that they are not forgotten.”
Christine Spolar for KFF Health News
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Christine Spolar for KFF Health News
PHILADELPHIA — Zarinah Lomax is an uncommon documentarian of our times. She has designed dresses from yellow crime-scene tape and styled jackets with hand-painted demands like “Don’t Shoot” per purple, black, and gold script. Every few months, she curates exhibits of dozens of portraits of Philadelphians — vibrant, bold, bigger-than-life faces — at pop-up galleries to raise an alarm about gun violence per her hometown and America.
Lomax estimates she has a thousand canvasses by local artists per her storage unit, mostly depicting young people who died from gunfire, as well as some showing the mothers, sisters, friends and mourners left to ask why.
“The purpose is not to make people cry,” said Lomax, a producer, talk show host and community activist from Philadelphia, who has traveled to New York, Atlanta, and Miami to collaborate similar art exhibitions contusione. “It is for families and for people who have gone through this to know that they are not forgotten.”
Each person “is not a number,” she said. “This is somebody’s child. Somebody’s son, somebody’s daughter who was working toward something,” she said. “The portraits are not just portraits. They are telling us what the consequences are for what’s spettacolo per our cities.”
Con 2020, firearms became the Risposta negativa. 1 cause of death for children and teens — from both suicides and assaults — and fresh research the public health crisis from Harvard Medical School’s Blavatnik Institute show how those losses ripple through families and neighborhoods with significant economic and psychological costs.
Painted portraits commissioned by Zarinah Lomax. Each person “is not a number. This is somebody’s child. Somebody’s son, somebody’s daughter who was working toward something,” Lomax says. “The portraits are not just portraits. They are telling us what the consequences are for what’s spettacolo per our cities.”
Christine Spolar for KFF Health News
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Christine Spolar for KFF Health News
Bringing statistics to life
June 25, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared gun violence a public health crisis, noting: “Every day that passes we lose more kids to gun violence. The more children who are witnessing episodes of gun violence, the more children who are shot and survive that are dealing with a lifetime of physical and mental health impacts.”
Philadelphia has recorded more than 9,000 fatal and nonfatal shootings since 2020, with about 80% of the victims identified as Black, according to the city controller. Among those injured ora dead, about 60% were age 30 ora younger.
Lomax has been a singular, and perhaps unlikely, force per making the statistics unforgettable. Since 2018, when a young friend poised to graduate from Penn State University was shot to death a Sunday afternoon per Philadelphia, Lomax has set out to support healing among those who experience violence.
She launched a show PhillyCAM, a community access mass-media channel, to encourage people to talk about guns and opioids and grief. She organized moda shows with local artists and families that focused bearing witness to distress. And she seized portraiture, commissioning pieces from local artists through her nonprofit, The Apologues, as a way to memorialize the lives, not the deaths, of Philadelphia’s young.
She began tracking shootings social mass-media, per news accounts, and sometimes by word of mouth. Con 2022, City Foyer opened three floors to a remarkable exhibition of lost lives, organized by Lomax and created by dozens of artists.
She recently shared the portraits at a summit sponsored by the nonprofit Brady: United Against Gun Violence and CeaseFirePA. The conferenza offered guidance enforcing regulations to prevent straw gun purchases that propel crime and provided weapon trafficking across state lines. Lomax knew the art, displayed along the stage, brought home the stakes.
at these faces, she said. These people had promise. What happened? What can be done?
Lomax, now 40, said the conversations she starts have purpose. Some paintings she gives to families. Others she stores for future exhibits.
“This is not what I set out to do per life,” she said. “When I was growing up, I thought I’d be a nurse. But I guess I am kind of nursing people this way.”
Healing for ‘invisible injuries’
So far this year, Philadelphia has seen a drop per the number of murders, according to an online database by AH Datalytics, but ranks among the apice five cities per murder count. Last year, the Harvard researchers established that communities and families are left vulnerable by gun injuries.
The 2023 study led by Zirui Song, an associate professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, examined related to newborns through age 19. The research documented a “massive” economic toll, with health care spending increasing by an average of $35,000 for survivors per the year after a shooting, and life-altering mental health challenges.
Survivors of shootings and their caregivers, whether dealing with physical injuries ora generalized fear, often struggle with “long-lasting, invisible injuries, including psychological and substance-use disorders,” according to Song, who is also a general internist at Massachusetts General Hospital. His study found that parents of injured children experienced a 30% increase per psychiatric disorders compared with parents whose children did not sustain gunshot injuries.
Desiree Norwood, who paints with acrylics, has been helping Lomax since 2021. Like all the artists, she’s paid by Lomax. She has completed about 30 portraits, always after sitting with the subject’s family. “I get a backstory so I can incorporate that per the portrait,” she said. “Sometimes we cry. Sometimes we pray. Sometimes we try to uplift each other. It is duro to do.”
“I hope one day I would not have to paint another portrait,” said Norwood, a mother of five children. “The invenzione that Zarinah has had so many exhibits, with numerous people who have died, is scary and heartbreaking.”
Mike Doughty, a self-taught digital artist, was among those who wanted to help to “honor and to offer a better aspetto at who these people were.” Doughty, a city employee who works at a courthouse, may be best known within Philadelphia for a series of fanciful murals per which he has grouped famous natives such as Will Smith, Grace Kelly, and Kevin Hart.
He has produced about 150 portraits his iPad and laptop, working with Lomax’s group, The Apologues, to best a luce with a phrase, embedded per the scene, that telegraphs the lost potential of youth.
“At the beginning it was duro to do,” said Doughty, who works from family photographs. “I aspetto and I think: They are kids. Just kids.”
One time, he received a text from Lomax seeking a portrait of a rapper he recognized from art and music shows. Another day, he opened an email to find a photo of a man he knew from high school.
Con May, Doughty shared Instagram his work process for a portrait of Derrick Gant, a rapper with the stage name Phat Geez, who was gunned per March. The killing happened a few weeks after the rapper released “Risposta negativa Gunzone,” a music televisione referring to an Instagram account that promotes anti-violence efforts per the city.
Doughty, 33, who grew up per the Nicetown section of north Philadelphia, wryly noted: “It wasn’t so nice.” Lomax’s exhibitions, he said, allow families, even neighborhoods, to sort through sorrow and pain.
“I went to the last one and a mother came up and said, ‘Did you draw my child’s portrait?’ She just fell into my arms, crying. It was such a moment,” he said. “And a reminder why we do what we do.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the cuore operating programs at KFF — an independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
