:: By Brooke E. O’Neill, AM’04

:: Photo courtesy Stephanie Arena

Peer Review ::

On exhibit

A history of violence

In the late 1980s, a 15-year-old boy was shot and killed because another teenager coveted the victim’s basketball jersey. The crime took place a block from the Chicago home of writer Stephanie Arena, AB’76, and her husband, photographer Robert Drea. The couple began following newspaper reports of domestic gun violence across the U.S., contacting survivors. Since 1991 they have interviewed 50 victims. Their photographs and stories appear in Wounded in America, a traveling exhibit showing through October at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. Victims such as Eileen, a registered nurse attacked while leaving Chicago’s Blue Line train, and William (below), a Pennsylvania attorney shot in the chest by the mentally ill daughter of a former client, gave firsthand accounts of their experience. In many cases, says Arena, “people were just doing mundane things like getting their hair done, returning from work.”