What’s in Your Container?

Curated by Rosie Gordon-Wallace and Breeana Thorne, MFA.

What’s in Your Container? The shipping container—a vessel of movement, transportation, and memory—serves as a lens through which we explore the personal and collective histories of containment. For Caribbean communities, containers and barrels symbolize both migration and support: they carry essentials, treasures, and the intangible legacies of family, culture, and resilience. These structures, physical and metaphorical, hold the weight of memory, trauma, care, and joy reflecting the ways we navigate histories shaped by colonialism, displacement, and global exchange. In What’s in Your Container, the works on view serve as sites of refuge— both physical and emotional—may be destroyed, leaving a void in which we seek healing. In response, artists turn inward, using their creative practice as containers for memory, grief, harmony, and regeneration. This exhibition invites students and visitors to consider their own vessels of memory. How do we hold our histories? What structures sustain us? And how can we transform grief and loss into acts of preservation, care, and renewed community? What’s in Your Container challenges us to see both the fragility and the resilience of memory, and encourages us to preserve the legacies of the past while imagining new forms of collective care and renewal.-
Breeana Thorne, Curator.