UF alumna supports victims of Pulse shooting with art

Last month, a shooter murdered 49 people at Pulse, a gay nightclub. Kelly O’Brien said she showed support for her friends in Orlando the only way she knows how.

The UF graduate, who now lives in California, drew caricatures of the 49 people who were killed and arranged their smiling faces into a rainbow colored heart. She captioned the drawing “Love Wins.”

She posted the finished work on Facebook for her friends to see before heading to work as a caricature artist. Two hours later she checked her phone between customers and was shocked to see the response people had to her work, she said.

“I didn’t even know the people who were reacting to it,” O’Brien said. “By the end of the day, I had thousands of reactions.”

On Facebook, her work has been shared by more than 12,000 people. Her post has received 18,000 likes and over 800 commenters have shared support for her work.

“I drew this because I wanted to remember the 49 beautiful people who died two weeks ago in my hometown,” O’Brien wrote on her post. “Who died in a place that was meant to signify acceptance and safety. I urge you to read their names and the words loved ones have written and said about them. To my friends who lost someone, I’m so sorry. We will never forget, and as time will prove, love will win if we continue to educate, to unite, to remain vigilant, and of course, to love.”

The drawing took O’Brien two weeks to finish. She researched each victim on the internet and found photos of them to draw. The drawing is now being used on T-shirts sold by various nonprofit organizations throughout the country, with proceeds going to the families of the victims.

She graduated from UF in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in drawing.

O’Brien drew their faces in black and white on her tablet. Each layer was a victim’s name.

“I had a bunch of jumbled up faces,” she said. “I wanted to make them be something. I didn’t want anyone to look more important than the person next to them.”

The former Orlando resident checked Facebook after hearing about the shooting to make sure that her friends were safe. She began to hear of friends of friends who had been inside of the club. She felt helpless being so far away, she said.

“I started (the drawing) for myself,” O’Brien said. “I felt like there was literally nothing I could do. Thinking about each one of them made me want to start drawing. I drew each person on a different layer, and once I drew a few I had to draw them all.”

Carolyna Guillen, the president of the UF Pride Student Union, said her first reaction to the shooting was also to check Facebook to see if her friends were safe. She and her friends had gone on road trips to Orlando to go to Pulse, she said.

“I can see that (O’Brien) is coming from a good place,” Guillen said. “Especially because of her attachment to it and her interaction with Pulse. It was her tragedy too.”

The 21-year-old UF microbiology and cell science junior said the quote “Love Wins” started when gay marriage was being legalized.

“It celebrated an achievement,” Guillen said. “She used it to depict victims of a shooting. Love didn’t win that night. We were slaughtered as a consequence of our identity.”

The shooting was a hate crime against queer and transgender, black and brown people, she said.

“Love isn’t winning right now,” she said. “People say that love always wins and that it will win, but it gets hard when you’re trying to deal with a tragedy.”