A journey through grief: HH Hiaasen asks how Baltimoreans would complete the day of loved ones lost to gun violence

On June 28, 2018, Rob Hiaasen was supposed to get his hair cut.

But the 59-year-old editor and columnist at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis didn’t go — and now his family imagines what his day would have been like if he had. It’s all hypothetical, as a gunman entered the newspaper’s office that day, unhappy with a story the paper had written about him years prior. He opened fire with a shotgun and murdered Wendi Winters, Gerald Fischman, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith, and Hiaasen. 

“It was Mom’s birthday,” said HH Hiaasen, an interdisciplinary artist and one of Rob’s three children. “I would have liked for him to have left. I would have liked for none of it to happen, but I would have liked for him to have gone to the appointment and then go have birthday cake with my mom.”

Hiaasen has turned these wishes and dreams of days painfully cut short into an art exhibit in the South Gallery of Baltimore’s City Hall, which is filled with nearly 3,000 notes that do more than just commemorate those who lost their lives or survived the violence — it asks people to describe that fateful day as if the shooting had never happened.

Hiaasen’s interactive exhibit, “Complete the Day,” which went live in Baltimore City Hall on January 12, is an extension of a research project and installation they created in grad school in Virginia, which detailed their father’s unfinished workday.

The project commemorating their father and others who have been impacted by gun violence is the culmination of years of work for Hiaasen, a 33-year-old Baltimore County native who now teaches graphic design at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The silk chartreuse squares are posted on the walls of Baltimore City Hall’s South Gallery and flutter with the draft of people passing by, animating the exhibit in a manner resembling the ripples of a wave.

Many of the yellow and green squares are blank, each one representing an hour left unexperienced in the days of those who had their lives interrupted by gun violence in 2024 and 2025. Others are imprinted with what seem to be descriptions of mundane tasks written in red ink, such as “play laser beam with cat.” 

The silk squares move along a spectrum of yellow to green, depicting the ages of victims. Yellow is older; green is younger. The color chartreuse has been a consistent theme in both Hiaasen’s work and attire, and more than a dozen visitors have scrawled their answers to Hiaasen’s question in red ink thus far.

Chartreuse is also the color of the Post-it note that one of Rob Hiaasen’s co-workers gave him the day of the shooting. “Spectrum of shit,” the note read. It was a playful reference to a comment Rob made earlier that day, when he asked her to “do something related to the spectrum of shit” in the news cycle.

“It’s kind of ugly, kind of not. It’s very mesmerizing, and if you stare at it long enough, it’ll actually change the cones in your eyes. It’s such an intense color. It’s mesmerizing and highlighting in the sense that it’s a tool that highlights something that people don’t want to talk about,” Hiaasen said. 

The color, the words, and the note-taking process have all played a role in Hiaasen’s journey through grief.

The exhibit in the City Hall building “brings it home,” from a grad school project in Virginia to Baltimore, Hiaasen said. Bright squares on marble floors lead to the exhibit, displaying quotes from their father and what he would have done with the rest of his day in June 2018. “Find people doing the work and talk to them,” one square reads.

“Take a deep breath,” advises another square as one walks up to the South Gallery, its walls lined with vivid reminders of the toll gun violence has had on the city.

Hiaasen considers themself more an artist than an activist. But the location of the exhibit allows those in power in Baltimore to experience the grief and stories of those who have been impacted by gun violence, they said. Whether politicians channel the experience into policy is up to them. 

And those experiences have impacted Baltimoreans of all backgrounds, leaving loved ones to only imagine how the day could have gone differently.

“She kisses her two dogs on the head before spending the evening at a friend’s house,” one note reads. “The room is full of people who love her.”

“She falls asleep feeling loved and safe,” reads another.

“It’s been helpful to write things down,” Hiaasen said. “Sometimes it’s just the process of putting the language to what the grief feels like, whether one day it feels like utter shit or another day where you’re like, ‘I think I’m OK.’ Also, imagining what could happen — what should have happened.”

In Baltimore, homicides are often spoken about by the numbers. There were 334 homicides in the city during the time frame covered by Hiaasen’s project, and a historic decline in violent crime has prompted government officials to throw out statistics instead of the names and stories of those who have been impacted.

Hiaasen, however, wants words to take precedence over figures. They also want those stories to help people heal.

“I want this space to be a place for people to gather and grieve, something I feel like I really didn’t have,” they said. “To actually hear from the people who [gun violence] affects, and to have space for the sort of discomfort of that.”

Those impacted by gun violence are encouraged to participate in the interactive exhibit, and they can visit completetheday.info to answer the question, “How would you complete a loved one’s day?”

Hiaasen plans to hold workshops in and outside of the exhibit space for those who’d like to participate in person while it’s active, which will be announced on the @complete_the_day Instagram page. The exhibit will remain on display in Baltimore City Hall until April 5.

On a cold February afternoon days before the exhibit’s opening reception, Hiaasen walked along the exhibit’s walls, extending their hand to gently feel the silk squares as they responded to the movement. At the exhibit’s center sits a bench, where they spoke about their father, the importance of grieving, and the prominence of the highlighter-like color that was all over the walls.

On one of those walls, there was a darker chartreuse square. It was written by their mother, Maria.

“Come home. Eat birthday cake with me,” the note read.