77 Minutes in Their Shoes includes long-term, community involvement with the victims' families and survivors devastated by the 2022 shooting in Uvalde, Texas at Robb Elementary, which took the lives of 19 students and 2 teachers. Since 2022, I have been fostering a relationship with the nonprofit Lives Robbed, formed by the families, to witness and understand the full impact of these massacres and the role of art in helping communities process grief, establish connection, and enact change.

77 Minutes in Their Shoes, serves as an extension of my socially engaged practice which surveys our exposure to gun violence in the USA through photography and installation. Thirteen of the twenty-one families chose to participate in the project. 77 Minutes in Their Shoes features twelve color photographs of the shoes the Uvalde children were wearing at the time of their deaths. A teacher's running weight vest, which closely resembles a bulletproof vest, was also included. The shoes and vest were photographed as a straightforward document and as evidence of this tragic event. The still-life photographs are paired with black and white photographs of the family holding the shoes and vest. These intimate portraits reveal the families' vulnerability, resiliency, anger, and hope for a better outcome through their participation in this project.

The Uvalde families titled the project 77 Minutes in Their Shoes, which references the horrors their children and the teachers endured at Robb Elementary. However, for me as an artist and mother of two young children, the project also encompasses the seventy-seven minutes each person within their community waited for news of loved ones. This event did not just impact the 21 lost lives but forever changed all those still living.

For a recent installation of 77 Minutes in Their Shoes, I chose to print the shoes and vest to scale and frame them in simple floating pine boxes. The children and teachers are never coming home. This is a fixed reality. The family portraits were also printed nearly life-size on sheer fabric resembling vertical banners. Audiences subtly moved the portraits as they navigated around the families before reaching a small room housing the photographs of the shoes and vest. Audiences were confronted again with these images as they exited the space. The threshold from safe to unsafe and citizen to survivor is growing smaller every day. These banner portraits serve as the ongoing faces of gun violence in America.

I hope to create two versions of this project to accommodate unique sites. One version has already been created as seen in the additional file uploads in the work samples. This recent exhibition version included five, 8 foot by 43 inch vertical black and white dye sublimation triptychs on fabric and 12, 15x15 archival color pigment prints on Hahnemühle Baryta mounted on Dibond and framed in a floating pine frame and 1, 17x17 archival color pigment print on Hahnemühle Baryta mounted on Dibond and framed in a floating pine frame. The second version of the project will exist as diptychs sized at 28 x 14 inches framed in either the pine frame, but with museum plexiglass for protection or a white minimal frame with museum plexiglass. The diptychs will be a combination of one half color for the shoes and the other half black and white for the portraits.