MASS Design’s traveling gun violence memorial is now on view in Boston. It’s asking you to imagine the lives of victims.

“I think about him every day. It’s like it never leaves your mind,” Smith said recently. “He’s always in my heart. All day. Every day.”

That’s why she loaned items that remind her of Dre’Shaun — his Red Sox T-shirt, brown baby shoes, and a dog tag with his photo — to the Institute of Contemporary Art through the Gun Violence Memorial Project. The installation was created by the local architecture firm MASS Design Group and artist Hank Willis Thomas, who also partnered on “The Embrace” sculpture on Boston Common.

Dre’Shaun’s items are now on display among hundreds of others provided by families of gun violence victims from Boston and across the country. The mementos are encased in the walls of four glass houses, each made up of 700 clear bricks — a reference to the average number of gun deaths per week in the United States in 2018, when the project was created. (That statistic has since risen to 840 deaths a week, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a national nonprofit that advocates for gun control.)

The traveling memorial, previously shown in Chicago and Washington, D.C., has been in Boston since late August, spread over three locations: two houses at the ICA, one at the MASS Design Group gallery in South End, and one at City Hall.

Pamela Bosley and Annette Nance Holt, who cofounded the Chicago-based gun violence prevention organization Purpose Over Pain after their own sons were fatally shot, also helped conceptualize the memorial.

“We conceived of the project as you see it today, these four glass houses, as a way to create a framework through which families like Pam’s and Annette’s could co-create a memorial to their loved ones,” said MASS Design Group principal Jha D Amazi, who leads the firm’s work on memorials.

So far, more than 1,000 objects have been collected in collaboration with 50 gun violence prevention organizations across 30 cities, Amazi said. Each time the project moves to a new host city, mementos from local families are added during object collection events. In Boston, the artistic team chose to work with the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, which hosted two item-collection events in the summer; another will follow in November. (All three Boston memorial locations will be open until January.)

The scope of the outreach is meant to match the magnitude of the issue.

In June, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared firearm violence a public-health crisis in America. Inspired by the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the idea behind the Gun Violence Memorial Project was to individualize the loss of life while also acknowledging its scale. It’s about balancing “the intimate and the infinite,” as Amazi puts it.

On a recent afternoon at the ICA, that balance was apparent.

Inside the two glass houses on display in the museum were objects as varied as the lives they represent: cigarillos, a business card, a can of Coca-Cola, earbuds, a bible, toys, car keys, locks of hair, goggles, a school essay graded A+, stuffed animals, a microphone, a wrench.

They represent lives ended by different kinds of gun violence: suicide, accidental deaths, murders. People killed by strangers or by loved ones. Those who lost their lives as children, teens, adults, or in old age. People of different racial, regional, and economic backgrounds.

The memorial invites viewers to step into those lives by imagining why certain objects were included, Amazi said. They hint at the professions, hobbies, and families these people left behind; the unfulfilled plans, hopes, and potential. The project challenges viewers to contemplate their own mortality and relationship to gun violence, while imagining how victims’ lives may have unfolded without such widespread access to guns.

But the memorial is meant to send a political message, too.

“It inherently is going to involve our legislation and our leaders to really make change and to stop this epidemic,” said Ruth Erickson, chief curator at the ICA.

“In Boston, we like to pride ourselves that violence is down [and] we’re ahead of the rest of the country,” said Clementina Chéry, founder of the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute. Indeed, the city has seen its homicide and total shooting numbers continue to fall in recent years. Still, Chéry said, the memorial serves as an important reminder to Bostonians that “for each of these victims, there is a family that is still grieving, there is a family that still has to work, and still has to walk these streets.”

The institute is working on legislative priorities, such as extending bereavement time for grieving families who’ve lost someone to gun violence in Massachusetts, forgiving debt incurred from funeral costs by families of gun violence victims, and gaining national recognition for Homicide Victims Awareness Month.

Amazi said the artistic team chose to display the memorial at Boston City Hall because they wanted to “have it in a space where civic participation is prioritized [and] where public interaction is ever present.”

According to Erickson, that thinking is indicative of a larger movement among contemporary artists focused on reimagining American monuments. “We’ve moved from a place of contestation as a country — really thinking about what needs to be taken down — into a space of really thinking about what stories and figures need to be creatively reinterpreted,” she said.

Long-term, Amazi said, the goal is to focus on how the memorial will continue to evolve and grow, both in size and impact.

“There are still spaces in the houses, but that is mostly because our outreach is not complete,” she said. “The intent is to fill the houses knowing that there are, unfortunately, more than enough families who have been impacted by this epidemic.”

Smith, the Roslindale mother who lost her son to gun violence, hopes people “take away peace, love, and understanding” from the memorial because gun violence is “just getting worse,” she said. “I fear for the next generations. We’ve got to get some kind of hold of this.”

The Gun Violence Memorial Project is on display at the ICA, Boston City Hall, and the MASS Design Group gallery through Jan. 20, 2025.

Julian E.J. Sorapuru can be reached at julian.sorapuru@globe.com. Follow him on X @JulianSorapuru.