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 ” in 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 in her hometown and America.
Lomax estimates she has a thousand canvasses by local artists in 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 on similar art exhibitions on trauma. “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 happening in our cities.” In 2020, firearms became the No.
1 cause of death for children and teens — from both suicides and assaults — and fresh research on the public health crisis from Harvard Medical School’s Blavatnik Institut.
