1,000 Ways to Hold | Erika Chong Shuch at Stanford Arts

Why It Matters

The initiative turns everyday making into measurable community-building and public storytelling, offering museums a model for interactive, socially engaged exhibitions that deepen audience participation and document institutional communities. It also provides Stanford a tangible way to test outreach and co-creation strategies for arts programming.

Summary

Erika Chong Shuch, a visiting artist at Stanford Arts, is leading "1,000 Ways to Hold," a participatory project that will produce 1,000 ceramic pinch-pot bowls made by members of the Stanford and affiliated communities. Participants receive a ball of clay, make a simple bowl while sharing personal stories about what they have held—memories, hope, resentment—and those narratives are recorded. The finished bowls and audio stories will be installed at the Anderson Collection, where visitors can activate each bowl on a custom-built machine to hear its maker’s voice. The project doubles as a community portrait and an experimental engagement platform developed with students and external artists.

Original Description

1,000 Ways to Hold is a year-long participatory project by Stanford Arts’ 2025–26 VPA Visiting Artist Erika Chong Shuch, whose work brings people together through performance, ritual, social practice, and shared acts of care.

Rooted in conversation and clay, the project invited two people at a time to shape ceramic bowls in pairs while reflecting on a shared prompt: “What have you held, and what has held you?”

Across the academic year, Erika moved through classrooms, community spaces, and everyday corners of campus, creating intimate meeting places for students, staff, faculty, and neighbors to slow down, listen, and make something side by side. Each bowl carries a digital trace of that encounter, forming a living archive of touch, memory, and connection.

This short doc follows Erika through the full arc of the residency: student workshops, paired-making sessions, clay preparation and firing, the installation build at the Anderson Collection, and the final activation of the gallery. Inside the Wisch Family Gallery, hundreds of bowls gather as both artwork and invitation — asking visitors to touch, listen, and enter the memory of the encounters that shaped them.

1,000 Ways to Hold is on view at the Anderson Collection’s Wisch Family Gallery

April 2 – August 17, 2026

Read more in the Stanford Report: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/04/new-exhibition-asks-what-have-you-held

Video: Taylor Jones

Additional Workshop Footage: Heechan Lim

Sync IDs:

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