Collect the unfinished
Families can identify objects, work, plans, and creative fragments that represent a life interrupted by gun violence.
Museum of Incomplete
A museum of the things gun violence never allowed people to finish.
Museum of Incomplete transforms personal objects, works in progress, and unfinished dreams into evidence of what gun violence removes from families and communities.
LAUNCHED / ACTIVE
2019
2019
project launch
1 object
can reveal an unfinished life
∞
stories that should have continued
CAMPAIGN GALLERY
The work, up close.
WHAT IT IS
Gun-violence statistics can become abstract. Museum of Incomplete takes the opposite approach: it asks people to look closely at what a person left behind — a basketball shoe, a journal, a drawing, a plan, a piece of work that will never be finished.
Each object represents both presence and absence. It is still here, but the person who gave it meaning is not. The museum uses that tension to move the conversation away from numbers and toward the futures that were interrupted.
HOW THE IDEA WORKED
Attention is only useful
if it moves somewhere.
CTR initiatives are designed to do more than communicate. Each one creates a path from attention to participation, accountability, remembrance, or action.
Tell the human story
The artifact becomes an entry point into who the person was and what they were still becoming.
Make absence visible
By focusing on what can never be completed, the project asks viewers to confront the scale of possibility lost with every death.
IMPACT
A memorial built around potential, not statistics.
The project was created with MullenLowe and has been discussed as an example of how visual storytelling can make the human cost of gun violence tangible. Joaquin's basketball shoe became one of its defining objects, representing the season — and life — he never got to finish.
WHY IT STILL MATTERS
Museum of Incomplete gives Change The Ref a quiet but forceful form of confrontation: instead of showing only how a life ended, it asks us to imagine everything that life should still have contained.
CREATED WITH
- Change The Ref
- MullenLowe
- Families and contributors who shared personal artifacts
PERMANENT HOME
Explore all initiatives
This initiative lives here now.
Original campaign sites may change or go offline over time. ChangeTheRef.org keeps the full story, purpose, and legacy of this initiative accessible in one permanent place.