Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Pulse victims will live on in traveling memorial
Daphne Josaphat didn’t want her nephew to be forgotten.
She sat with a group on the second floor of Sam Flax art store on East Colonial Drive in Orlando on Wednesday. A black and gray painting of Jason Josaphat, killed June 12, 2016, in the Pulse nightclub shootings, hung among other portraits on the wall.
Josaphat, 41, along with other families that lost loved ones during Pulse, are painting portraits of their fallen relatives for the Orlando Traveling Memorial.
“Even though this is hard and emotional, and I’m surprised I’m holding up right now, I always want to be involved to keep his memory on,” Josaphat said.
The memorial, planned by Central Florida artist Colleen Ardaman over the past 11 months, is large — it’s designed to be 10 feet tall and more than 100 feet long. It’s also modeled as an interconnecting series of 4-foot-wide and 10-foot-tall panels that can be separated for travel.
On June 8, Pulse families started painting the portraits drawn by local artist Jeff Sonksen.
Wednesday’s session had Jean Carlos Nieves Rodriguez’s family and Amanda Alvear’s mother filling in their relatives’ portraits with tones of black and gray, which stand out against the colorful mural.
Ardaman estimates the initial price for constructing the mural will be $250,000. She’s raising money through donations and has about 30 volunteers working to raise money, but doesn’t know where or when the mural will be erected.
She declined to comment on what would happen to the portraits if the memorial project falls through.
“Failure is not an option,” she said.
Sonksen helped families work on the paint-bynumbers portraits while filming everything with a color-spattered GoPro attached to his forehead.
“I think the [mural] idea is cool,” he said, then gestured toward the families painting together. “I think the coolest part, though, is what you’re seeing right here.”