In 2013, we had the opportunity to collaborate with award-winning photographer, Justin Maxon, and the Magnum Foundation to create Heaven's Gain—an exploration of the everyday implications of gun violence. Our point of departure? Chester, Pennsylvania. A community that lies just beyond the City of Brotherly Love. A community more commonly known as a crime capital.

By assembling fragments from individuals’ lives—photos, diaries, and drawings—with cultural iconography, interviews, images, and ephemera—the installation invites individuals to look beyond the stereotypes of a community in crisis and consider our commonalities. Because as Donald Newton—artist, activist, and lifetime resident of Chester points out, ”Night now in Chester is night now in many places—night now in Philadelphia, in Camden, and every other place you can think of…”