Carina A. del Rosaio embraces the term “cultural worker” to describe the multifaceted nature of her work as a journalist, grant writer, communications professional, photographer and visual artist. She serves as the Washington Youth Arts Leadership Program Specialist for Arts/WA / Washington State Arts Commission and she has exhibited work in galleries and museums in Washington and Arizona.
Del Rosario uses art, storytelling, and history to build community and bring people together. Her installation project, Lay Your Burden Down, opened November 18, 2025 at the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM).
The installation brings together art and care in a participatory textile project. Leading up to the installation, del Rosario came to different events, set up a “burden station” and invited community members to write out their burdens on paper, which she collected, some 250 in total. Del Rosario then convened sewing circles “to tend and bolster those burdens, and then turned the embroidered pieces into pillows, which are on display on a luxurious hammock,” according to the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) website.
As the del Rosario describes the project on the SAM website: “Lay Your Burden Down is a communal act of care that allowed participants to experience respite, feel support in carrying on, and, in the case of my sewing circle partners, provide comfort and sympathy.”
As time goes by, del Rosario increasingly sees community building as central to her vocation as an artist.
I spoke with del Rosario in the installation space at SAAM. The following interview has been edited for length.
Karen Maeda Allman: What is your experience with sewing and with craft?
Carina A. del Rosario: My own experience with sewing is pretty recent. My grandmother on my dad’s side was a seamstress in the Philippines. She had actually made little outfits for my sister and me—little magic outfits. And I’ve always been interested in textiles, but there was no one really around to show me how to sew, as we left the Philippines when I was six. It wasn’t until the pandemic first hit that I put on my list of things that I wanted to do during this time was to sew. I reached out to my former coworker and friend, quilter and fabric artist Brenetta Ward, and asked if she would be willing to teach me how to sew.
She’s very organized. She said, ‘What are your goals?’ And so during the course of that, I realized, oh, I really love hand sewing. We had maybe six sessions of hand sewing and machine sewing and she started hosting regular sewing circles with friends who are really accomplished.
KMA: You call them your Sashiko sisters?
CDR: Yeah, the Sashiko sisters. They all used to be part of African American cultural associations and I was the little sister that they welcomed in. And they have been so great. We would just hang out and everyone would work on their own projects and sometimes ask each other for advice.
And since then, I pursued some other workshops, specifically on Bojagi, the Korean textile technique that we practiced together for Lay Your Burden Down. There’s just something so pleasurable about the hand sewing and embroidery that I really like. Some of the Sashiko sisters participated within the project as well and participated in a pilot workshop before my first official sewing circle.
KMA: How did you pick Bojagi for this project?
CDR: I’ve gone to plenty of museums where I’ve sought out textile works. I’ve traveled to Seoul as well. And I’ve always admired the way that they are assembled and how timeless they are, and elegant. In the more traditional form of Bojagi, they typically work with more solid colors. which I also love and enjoy. So it was a little bit of melding of that process and aesthetic with African American quilting. I really liked the combination of the two. There were some really wonderful African design fabrics donated by my sisters. And it was so lovely to see such a mix of people.
KMA: What questions were you asking in this project?
CDR: I knew the question that I wanted to ask, which was, ‘What’s causing you heartache right now?’
Jason Porter, Deputy Director for Education and Public Engagement at Seattle Art Museum, was helping me talk through my ideas, and he was wondering about what sort of themes might come out and if there’s going to be a way to track that.
It was interesting to see that there were—I don’t want to minimize it by calling it existential or political because people are very directly affected by the oppression that we’re experiencing right now—very political, social political worries and experiences that people were having. And such specific personal pain. I have experienced parents dying or parents being ill or fractured relationships. There are others that I haven’t experienced, like, I haven’t given up a child for adoption. I haven’t actively tried to get pregnant and miscarry. I haven’t had those kinds of losses, but other people have.
So it was just really powerful to see people in the sewing circles gravitate to the one burden that really spoke to them.
KMA: How did you collect burdens for this project?
CDR: I showed up at a few different events, like here at the museum. And I asked permission to set up a burden station. I had materials available for people and they could either write at that moment and drop it into the receptacle, or they could take a self-addressed stamped envelope and just take a few home and mail it back to me. Some people did take that option. And the Seattle Art Museum set up a little self-service station in their downtown location (as did ArtX Contemporary Gallery). The SAM station was off one of the galleries in a little family hangout space. They set it up there with instructions. So it was a mix of kind of in-person interaction and these self-service stations.
KMA: So you had the burden stations at a variety of places, and you had people write their burdens on kozo washi paper, and then you processed the paper with konnyaku powder?
CDR: I’ve always loved different Japanese paper–making techniques and I remembered that there was something that might help in this situation. And so, yay, for YouTube videos. I ordered the konnyaku powder because I wanted to try to do it the original way where you add water and stir it for 20 minutes. And then once it becomes viscous, you brush it onto the kozo paper and then you rub it in, you crumple it and then that really works the starch into the paper fibers.
So that means that I picked up every single burden. I looked at it. Like I had to kind of mentally prepare myself before I would do it—just take it in. Yeah. So, yeah, I would just take each one, look at it and think about it and massage that structure into it. And sew it on another piece of material. So there’s a lot of handling and many, many people looked and handled each piece. I thought about what the person was saying and that’s like 250 people. It’s not duplicative.
KMA: I’ve looked at some of the pictures of the sewing circles where the burden papers are handled, stitched with other material and embellished with embroidery. You’re calling the participants in these circles caregivers, right?
CDR: They are caregiver circles, and they’re all really different. Some are outside, some are inside and some are in people’s homes.
Part of the Seattle Art Museum fellowship is directed towards teaching artists and part of the commitment that I made in accepting the fellowship was to have some element that involved a school. I’ve had this relationship with Chief Sealth High School through the museum—over a dozen years and 50 or 60 students who were part of the multilingual learner program came to the museum. A couple of random elementary school kids came with their parents, so the age range of participants was high school through maybe 80–plus years old. And it really was lovely, especially when I would have a mix of age groups, like this one young woman, she had wandered in ArtX Contemporary gallery when I was first collecting burdens and filled out a couple.
When the sewing circles started happening, she showed up for a few, and everybody just kind of took her in. She had some questions about her life stage and people were just giving her advice or just listening. It became much more than caretaking of the burdens that have been written, but it was like caretaking of each other in the room. The conversations that I would overhear of complete strangers getting into–how rich that was to witness and to experience.
KMA: The burdens are varied, and include things like being diagnosed with cancer or giving up a child for adoption…people were picking up burdens that spoke to them.
CDR: The way that I framed it for people was that I thought there were burdens that might resonate with what they were experiencing. And I think there was a different kind of power in seeing that your sorrow was being shared by someone else you don’t know. Even looking at some of the quilt panels, you can see where people had decorated around them. It was almost like they are part of a physical caregiving that’s happening. And it was just so moving. And some are so personal and some are more kind of existential, I guess. It’s such a mix.
When I participated in the couple of sewing circles that I was part of, I didn’t expect storytelling amongst the caregivers to be such a component of it, but it really is. And I’ve found that also when I’m in a couple of other kinds of more informal craft groups.
KMA: I think I remember you speaking about a fellowship that you had in addition to the Constance Wright Fellowship from SAM.
CDR: Yes, kind of out of the blue, I got an email awarding me a fellowship from the Hermitage Artist Retreat. I almost deleted it! The fellowship award is for up to four weeks at their residency. So I took it all for four weeks last April. I took some sewing. I took books, I took paint, you know, drawing and painting materials. And I was trying to tell myself not to have any expectations that it’s going to be my time to give myself permission to experiment. Because that’s a nice thing about this residency. You’re not required to have a product. Someone else has nominated you.
I had some sewing with me and Abraham Verghese’s novel, The Covenant of Water. It’s long and it was just so lovely to immerse myself in the book and just to have that openness to receiving ideas. I knew that I would enjoy his writing and I had good things about it. And his work is all about healing–caregiving and healing. It was, you know, very serendipitous. That was the book that I brought.
KMA: Where were you in the process when you got your residency?
CDR: At the Hermitage? Nowhere. Nowhere. I didn’t get funding for another project and I was also still kind of recovering from two or three years of just working really hard and seeing my partner also working hard through the pandemic. We were both burned out. And when I got the residency, I just was able to exhale and unwind and really just do my own kind of healing and resting.
KMA: What were some of the challenges you faced along the way?
CDR: Over the summer, I needed to take a break to help take care of my dad, so that was a chunk of time. And so I set up a whole bunch of sewing circles in September. And at one of them, I had been invited to set up this sewing circle at a person’s home. And one of the participants had been volunteering at Heron’s Nest Outdoor Education Center. This property had been a commercial property that was completely wrecked environmentally. It was going to get sold and then a bunch of groups worked together with the Duwamish tribe to rehabilitate the land. And so I was invited to do a sewing circle and the person organizing it, Aloysious Todd, said they have this creative resistance day where people are invited to bring their art projects and ask for help.
What I needed at that stage was people to hand sew the (stitched and embellished) burdens into strips for me so that I could get ready to sew them into pillows. And it was so interesting as it’s such a gift to receive help, but then when you don’t know that you need help and you’re kind of stunned because they asked you what you need help with and it wasn’t them telling you.
KMA: Finally, there were more challenges in designing the installation?
CDR: I knew that I was going to display the pillows in a hammock and, at least in this hammock setting, people wouldn’t really be able to see all of the burdens. I wanted to make sure that all the burdens could be read. And so there are quilts over to the side that you can touch where the people have written.
I wanted to keep the burden writers anonymous to make it more universal. There are some folks whose writing I can recognize and when someone else finished embellishing them, I actually took a picture and would send it back to them with a note saying, “I hope you felt cared for today. Somebody was taking care of you today.”
Right now, it’s like, here this is the culmination of a year’s effort and I’m trying to seek out funding so I can continue it not only here in Seattle, but in other communities. I specifically want to seek out community spaces like senior living places, healthcare facilities, just like non-museum or non-art specific spaces, just like to bring it out into other places that community members gather.
Lay Your Burden Down by Carina A. del Rosario. On display through April 13, 2026 at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 East Prospect St (in Volunteer Park). Open Wed-Sun 10 am-5 pm. Free on the First Thursday of Every Month (More information on “Lay Your Burden Down,” museum ticket discounts and “pay what you wish” programs at https://seattleartmuseum.org/
