This June, the Carousel House will transform from a neighborhood landmark into a vast starry sky and an intimate fire around which people can gather to share stories and find connection. With “The Story of Stories”, historian Kathy Kelly creates an immersive program that moves guests through the evolution of storytelling in all its forms – visual, oral, live – using the architecture of the Carousel Building as the backdrop.

Throughout the day, guests are encouraged to share their own small stories, words, and images, using mediums such as drawing, hand prints and typewriters.

As dusk descends, the ceiling of the Carousel Building will fill with those painted hands, layered over projections provided by Luminous Abstract of the oldest art humanity ever made: the caves of Lascaux, the walls of Chauvet, marks pressed into stone 40,000 years ago by ancient hands. This is when the magic of “The Story of Stories” is revealed.

Kathy will take all the stories created earlier in the day and weave them together into a single, larger story of place, time, and storytelling itself, much like how communities might have gathered and shared in a cave 40,000 BCE. The result connects the echoes of the past with the present moment and illustrates the power of storytelling in bringing people together and revealing our shared humanity.

Come during the day and leave something behind. Come at night and hear it returned to you as myth.

Free and open to the public. Storytelling begins at dusk.