Things We Carry: What Children Create. What We Hold. How We Connect.

Everyone has a story, a memory, and a treasured object. These are the things we carry with us. And when it's hard to put them into words, we can share them through art. Things We Carry is an intergenerational community art experience and fundraiser presented by Rooster & Hen Resources, a nonprofit providing grief education through art and story. The exhibition grows from creative programming with more than 200 summer campers, inviting children to explore feelings, memories, connection, and the objects that hold meaning for them. Children's individual drawings and ideas became four large collective works of art. But the children's work is only the beginning. Throughout the exhibition, visitors are invited to become part of each piece. Add your own feeling to a mirror. Follow a thread from a child's story to an adult's treasured object. Create a small clay sculpture of something you treasure and add its story to the collection. Or write a story of loss or memory on a paper link and add it to a growing chain that makes visible the invisible weight we may carry together. The objects displayed alongside the children's artwork belong to adults and hold stories of their own. As the exhibition unfolds, the lines between artist and audience, child and adult, individual and community begin to blur. Because we all carry something. We carry feelings. We carry memories. We carry the people and places we love. We carry loss. And sometimes, without realizing it, we carry pieces of one another's stories. Things We Carry invites us to pause, create, listen, and connect—and to discover that while some things we carry are deeply personal, we don't have to carry them alone.