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Clark County will debut two exhibits in the fall to honor the victims and those affected by the Oct. 1 shooting, where a lone gunman left 58 dead and more than 800 injured at the Route 91 Harvest festival on the Las Vegas Strip.
The 58 white memorial crosses that were placed at the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign days after the shooting will be on display at the Clark County Government Center from Sept. 17 to Oct. 19. A public reception will be held at 6 p.m. Oct. 4 at the Government Center to bring awareness to the display.
At the Clark County Museum, the “How We Mourned; Selected Artifacts from the October 1 Memorials” exhibit will be displayed in the Heritage Gallery from Sept. 28 to Feb. 24.
The museum team, led by museum administrator Mark Hall-Patton and a group of about 20 volunteers, have recorded more 12,000 artifacts that were left at various memorial sites near the shooting site. About 1,000-1,500 of those will be featured in the exhibit.
“We’re making choices on items that show the variety of items that were left,” Hall-Patton said. “It’s giving people an idea of things that people left. Items like silk flowers, flags, stuffed animals, rosaries, posters. ”
About 5,000 items are left to curate, which will take about four-six months to process. Hall-Patton credits the volunteers for helping that process move along as other artifacts for future exhibits are also coming into the museum on a regular basis.
“The volunteers are meeting three days per week ever since everything was moved out here (in December),” Hall-Patton said. “If we didn’t have the volunteers this would have taken years. They’ve made a huge difference to get this work done.”
The museum gets several calls every week with people inquiring about the remembrance exhibit and Hall-Patton believes the exhibit will be well-attended with how many lives the tragedy affected.
“This affected so many people and not just the victims, their families and those who were there,” he said. “When you think about it, we’re a community of a little over 2 million and it affected just about everybody here and many of our visitors. This is something that continues to have a great interest.”
A permanent memorial to be placed on Las Vegas Boulevard is in the works, with Gov. Brian Sandoval leading the effort on what that will entail. The Clark County Museum is not part of that process.