ORLANDO, Fla. — As the Pulse Day of Remembrance approaches, people across Central Florida are remembering one of the things that helped them heal: art.
Colleen Ardaman, founder of the Orlando Traveling Memorial, said art helped people manage their emotions after the tragedy took place.
She said that using a paint-by-number format helped transformed family grief into remembrance and healing. Some of that artwork is now part of the Portraits of Pulse exhibit on display at Orlando City Hall.
In the 10 years after the Pulse tragedy, the people who helped create and organize the exhibit’s artwork are reflecting on the work they created to help remember the 49 lives lost.
“It’s far more important to have these faces, one by one, be painted by their loved ones,” Ardaman said. “That was our No. 1 goal.”
Ardaman is the one who helped encourage 49 different families and friends to paint each angel that was lost.
The portraits were displayed at the Orange County Board of County Commissioners building in downtown Orlando in 2018.
Since the shooting, Ardaman said she is proud of what her community created.
“Anniversaries are for a reason,” she said. “Right now, in front of me on this table are the 49 souls and lives lost that are a part of Orlando’s history forever. The world — they were all God’s children.”
Ardaman said she will never forget the delicate process of creating something memorable.
Like Ardaman, Carlos Díaz said he finds beauty in the creative process.
“I’m an art-ivist — artistic activist,” Diaz said. “I cope through making beautiful things. Art has something that I don’t understand, but when I do, time flies.”
He said that process helped him heal after his cousin, Jeff, was seriously injured in the Pulse nightclub attack — something he said was one of the hardest moments of his life.
Díaz told Spectrum News 13 that he was planning to go with his cousin to Pulse that night, but held off.
“My cousin got stuck in the bathroom — he got shot four times,” Díaz said. “His story of resilience is incredible, but the suffering he had to go through, all those surgeries, all of the therapy, the mental health piece of it, is the most important.”
Díaz created displays to help keep people from forgetting who was lost on June 12, 2016.
Even after the tragedy, Díaz said he knows the memory of those who were lost lives on through the artwork he and others have made.
The Orlando Traveling Memorial, now known as the Portraits of Pulse, went on display Thursday at Orlando City Hall. The exhibit is scheduled to stay open through Aug. 23.
Admission is free.
REMEMBERING PULSE
Ten years ago minus one day, the city of Orlando was dealing with a tragedy. Late Friday night, June 10th, 2016, singer Christina Grimmie was shot and killed after a concert at The Plaza Live at Colonial Plaza, just east of downtown Orlando. The Saturday morning news was overflowing about the horrific murder of a young celebrity in The City Beautiful’s own backyard. It was incomprehensible that someone would do such a thing, and then the incomprehensible was followed by the unimaginable. Some 27 and a half hours after Grimmie’s murder, another gunman opened fire at the Pulse Nightclub on South Orange Avenue in the SODO section of Orlando, killing 49 people and injuring 58 others. When daylight came, the numbers were staggering.
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