For Keep’s Sake | Objects Lost, Found, Kept, and Treasured

Curator’s note: Due to the current health restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 crisis, we are transitioning this exhibit into an ongoing, online viewing experience.
Visit the current gallery of images and stories from contributors.

Are you a collector, a seeker, a keeper?  Do you gleefully spot discarded objects on your path? Have you ever kept an object that you’ve found? What made you pick it up and why did you keep it? Where do you imagine it came from and to whom do you imagine it belonged? Has it changed in significance during your “ownership” of it? 

“For Keep’s Sake”  features found objects and the stories surrounding their discovery and reclamation. If you are interested in participating, please email us a photo of the object (or objects) you’d like to submit, along with any details about your connection to it and stories (real or imagined) about the object’s origins.

Curator Maya Stein’s statement: 
”I am a sucker for found objects. I have bent down in overflowing parking lots to retrieve a plastic carrot accidentally dropped and left behind. I have taken long, meditative strolls on deserted beaches in the hope of discovering something-or-other.  I  can wax rhapsodic about that cardboard box in elementary schools across America where an upheaval of unclaimed clothes and books and water bottles and ID cards and thing-a-ma-jigs collide in a chaotic tumble. And I have layered these finds with meaning, purpose, and beauty. In their desertion and discovery, they become omens, the bearers of metaphors and messages.

In their release and retrieval, they deliver a wink of hope, of possibility, of good fortune. When the landscape is interrupted by such an item, no matter its ordinariness, a certain magic takes hold. I feel spoken to, somehow. The object transcends its original purpose. It becomes a lucky charm to keep for a time, something to savor, to remind me of my own potency and potential and power. A lightning rod for who I might become. A totem for who I already am.”