Currently on view at ArtRage Gallery, Community Folk Art Center, and Point of Contact Gallery, “Deadlocked and Loaded: Disarming America” is a visual art exhibition in which 36 women artists use their artistic voices to address issues related to the U.S. culture of violence and gun issues, particularly how it affects women, children, and marginalized peoples.

In July 1969, a full-page advertisement in the Sunday  NY Times posed a request to the American public:

Hold onto this page for 1 year and hope and pray it’s ended.

The hopeful ad appeared one year after the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and 6 years after the shooting of President John Kennedy.

The copy reads:

The trouble is hoping and praying isn’t enough. Violence won’t end unless you’re willing to start the ending.

 

I have held onto this yellowing page for 51 years; the hope for the end of gun violence nearly extinguished.

In the wake of hundreds of multiple mass shootings in U.S. history since this ad appeared, the Senate still can’t take small steps to curb gun violence.

“My prayers are with you” congressmen numbingly utter, but in the same breath they greedily whisper “my votes are with the NRA.”

Offering prayers but failing to act, make their prayers ring hollow.

When are we going to start the ending?

The catalog is available on Amazon.