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Kensington’s Peace Park opened Sunday as a place to bring the neighborhood together and take a stand against the city’s gun violence epidemic through art and connection.

The park’s centerpiece is its Gun Violence Memorial Sculpture featuring disassembled weapons collected during gun buyback events in 2024. RAWtools Philadelphia co-founder Shane Claiborne and artist Jacob Christopher Hammes collaborated with Mural Arts to bring the piece to life.

During a block party to celebrate the park’s opening, Hammes said it was a “tremendous challenge” to work with firearms as the focal point of the project.

“Everything that we see in culture tells us to kind of revere these objects,” Hammes said. “But at the same time, these objects are responsible for a pretty bad epidemic of gun violence in the city.”

At the end of last year, Philadelphia officials touted a 37% drop in homicides since 2021, but still more than 200 people were killed in shooting incidents.

Teenagers from the neighborhood participated in the completion by learning welding skills that helped forge the centerpiece that “functions as though it’s a firepit,” according to Hammes.

“When people who have experienced gun violence pick up the hammer and beat a piece of metal on the forge that symbolically represents something that might have taken a family member away from them, that’s a powerful experience,” he said.

The design makes the sculpture a communal space as a way of bringing people together.

“I started working with some teenagers from the neighborhood, talking to them about gun violence and their attitudes were sort of shockingly very nonchalant,” Hammes said. “Just like, ‘Yeah, I’ve had a lot of people that I care about die, you know?’ That was really upsetting to find out because that’s not normal, but just the attitude that this is just the way it is and there’s no other way. That was kind of what we were hoping, that this could maybe represent a different way of thinking.”

Research from Johns Hopkins University in 2023 showed one person every 11 minutes in the United States was killed by a firearm. To represent this, the sculpture will light up for one minute every 11 minutes.

“These numbers are not just statistics,” Mural Arts founder and executive director Jane Golden said during the block party. “There is a human face behind this. These numbers represent people who are our friends, our neighbors, our families and our communities. This is why this work matters so much.”

The park is located at 3200 Potter St. near SEPTA’s Kensington-Allegheny station on the Market-Frankford Line.

Sunday’s event was done in partnership with Mural Arts’ Porch Light program, the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services, RAWtools and The Simple Way.