Open Drawers represents a multidimensional understanding of home and heart. Where we find home may not always be where we lay our head at night—it may be in objects and materials that we travelled with across oceans, have stowed away and forgotten about, use everyday and carry with us often, and which we find and keep to remind us of family, people, and places we both know and have never known. The heart, as a sustainer of human life, could be what inspires us, provides momentum, reminds us of a pleasant pastime, reflects our roots, or illustrates hope.
Each “drawer” (the individual cases holding the displays) of the exhibit offers a meditation on the phrase “home is where the heart is.” The home is private until you open the door, and each of these drawers is an invitation inside the “home” of the curator.
We invite each visitor to these collections to contemplate their own understandings of heart and home and to consider which drawers of their own they might want to open and reflect upon.
Open Drawers is a collaboration between the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture and the interdepartmental Dimensions of Material Culture graduate course. Each drawer is curated by one graduate student.
This exhibition was on view in the Nancy Nicholas Hall from March 31 – May 15, 2025.
Rebekah L. Jacobs
Stitching Through Time
Mixed media
“When I am dead and in my grave
And all my bones are rotten
When this you see remember me
Lest I should be forgotten”
-Quote embroidered on girls’ samplers, early
nineteenth century
Stitching Through Time navigates the relationship between objects and their makers, and the passage of time from mother to daughter. These objects are symbols of familial relationships and shared experiences, passed down through generations. Sewing with a mother or grandmother stitches together a bond, sharing knowledge and tradition. Each tool tells the story of love, patience, and the joy of creating something beautiful together. Needlework is a tangible bridge between the past and the future, preserving memories and family histories. Each tool, from the humble needle to the well-worn scissors, contributes to the artistry and tradition of needle crafts, keeping alive the memory of the hands that used them.
Honey K.
Bookshelves for Abolition
Mixed materials
Bookshelves for Abolition is an assemblage of items from the collector’s personal bookshelf in their home. These objects—books, personal photos, ephemera, and tchotchkes—represent a permeable barrier between the research and the scholar. The bookshelf acts as the heart of the home in that it holds the objects which nourish the collector’s will to survive. While the language surrounding what is done in academia is often referred to as “my research,” for many, the work is influenced and fueled by personal histories where lines between home and the academy blur.
In the case of the collector, as an abolitionist and scholar of carceral history, objects of the scholar become objects of the personal. The work is inextricably connected to family histories and lessons from family and loved ones, as well as hopes, dreams, and writing towards a liberatory future free from incarceration for all.
Anya Ekaterina
Memory Drawer
Acrylic on wood board
years go by where I don’t take any pictures of you
the sea churns between us and I can’t touch the light you wear
I never got to touch your hair the last three
times you dyed it pink
I see now / most of our lives / we’ll spend apart
and when I see him again
he won’t ask me to leave the light on
and her hands can’t braid my hair / any longer
but when things change / maybe you’ll live
on my way home
Memory Drawer unearths the painter’s forgotten art practice, tucked away art supplies, and the impossibility of storing or saving ephemeral moments.
Alba Martin
A Drawer to a New Life
Mixed materials
A Drawer to a New Life explores the transition from Spain to the United States of America through personal, meaningful objects that the traveler decides to pack in their suitcase. The objects displayed relate a series of elements from varied parts of their lives: music, sports, photography, textiles…. Specifically selected as meaningful and worth packing to a new life in a new place. These objects reflect a representation of heritage and emotional connection, offering a sense of comfort, memory and continuity—a way of not forgetting your past in a new country.
Andrew Miloshoff
The Good Dishes
Glass and ceramic kitchenware
The Good Dishes presents an assemblage of 20th-century uranium glassware and uranium-glazed ceramics, objects once common and well-used in the average home, now reframed through the lens of communal heritage and domestic ritual.
These pieces, radiant in both form and history, speak to deeply human experiences and practices: the preparation and sharing of meals, artistic expression, consumption, aspiration, or memory. Though they may seem ordinary or unassuming, their presence challenges us to reconsider the intimate architecture of home at the kitchen table or cabinet shelf. The quiet glow of tradition invites reflection on the objects that nourish the heart.
Shelly Grandell
Lessons (un)Learned
Mixed media and materials
We experience the world through our senses and our interpretations evolve and are shaped through varied lenses of lived experiences and interactions. Lessons (un)Learned explores the materiality of learning. Lessons can be learned from each of these items, images and histories,
but how does our subjectivity influence the experience? Who is teaching, learning, creating, and interpreting these lessons and WHERE is the learning taking place? These objects demonstrate potential vessels of learning and can ignite conversations on ways of knowing and being. What processes, systems, and knowledge need to be learned, relearned, or unlearned? Who decides? Consider not only the objects here, but also those in your own “learning drawer.” What do you find there…and what is missing?
Tingting Lyu
Remains
Mixed media and materials
Perhaps inherited from our foraging past, the impulse to collect and keep is hard to resist.This drawer reflects the artist’s obsession with holding on—an urge to preserve, to gather, to not let go. Withered flowers, a market pamphlet, a ticket stub, the container of a used-up candle… these seemingly worthless fragments form a quiet archive of what remains from a life lived, and a reminder that life, inevitably, becomes remains.
Katie Juneau
Kitchen Drawer
Mixed materials
The objects in this drawer represent a collective of culinary memories personal, familial, and cultural. Mixed in with hand-written family recipes are mass-produced booklets on new-at-the-time kitchen devices that help to locate these recipes within the larger history of the material world of the kitchen. Objects such as old measuring spoons serve as reminders of the material or physical process of cooking that the written words of the recipes invite. Collectively, this drawer speaks to the importance of the memories and practices associated with the kitchen in creating both
personal and collective identities. What recipes would you keep in your kitchen drawer?
Project Leads and Collaborators
Sarah Anne Carter, Course Instructor
Sarah Anne Carter, PhD, is Associate Professor and Chipstone Chair in Design and Material Culture in Design Studies and the Executive Director of the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture in the School of Human Ecology at University of Wisconsin–Madison. She taught this course in the spring of 2025.
Gianofer Fields, Interviewer
Having worked at WBEZ: Chicago Public Media, Fields is an award-winning journalist and the creator, curator, and producer of Radio Chipstone, a radio program on WORT Community Radio in collaboration with the Chipstone Foundation. Fields is an honorary fellow of the center.