What started as a children’s art project during the Hippodrome Theatre’s summer camp program has become a community spectacle.
“A River Full Of All My Lost Loved Ones” by Conrad Cheung, a 30-year-old assistant professor at the UF School of Art and Art History, is a vinyl art installation that spans the 26-foot-tall columns in front of the Hippodrome. It will be on display until Monday.
The vinyls wrap around the 115-year-old Hippodrome’s six columns, transforming the historical building into a colorful display of Gainesville’s youth. They include over 600 drawings of children from the theater’s summer camp programs.
The title of the exhibit is taken from the back of one camper’s artwork, Cheung said. The full sentence read, “IDK what to write here, but… a river full of all my lost loved ones.”
The goal of the exhibit was to help children express parts of themselves they might repress, Cheung said. They also had to consider kids who shared something they may not feel comfortable showing the public.
For Cheung’s project, they had asked children ages 8 to 17 about their emotions, feelings of safety and identity.
They described the Hippodrome as a place people can go where their identity will be respected.
“It became really, really clear that here was this physically central location that people were treating as a place for a certain kind of quiet liberation in the middle of Gainesville,” Cheung said.
One of the most distinctive features of the exhibit is the thermochromic ink, which Cheung used to highlight poems older children wrote as captions to their drawings.
When the stone columns reach a certain temperature, the ink disappears to reveal the words. For the rest of the day, these poetic snippets remain undisclosed.
The misspellings on the children’s art also stood out to Cheung, who embraced the jumbled, messy cultivation.
Kids wrote about gender identity and stereotypes, they said, topics they might hesitate to talk about at home.
“The confusion that kids have was actually delivered with a real clarity that I think needs to be taken seriously,” they said.
Some of the art is unreadable, Cheung said, and that’s the point.
Challenging viewers to decide what the illegibility means to them, the question is prompted by both the visual art and the musical accompaniment of Colin Self, who composed the exhibit’s opening musical performance on Aug. 28.
Cheung expects viewers to be confused at first glance, but they hope the confusion will lead to curiosity and engagement with the artwork.
One confused onlooker saw the opening performance and posted it on Facebook, where they suggested a satanic ritual was occurring.
“This is partly probably because all of the performers were dressed in robes that were covered in children’s drawings,” Cheung said. “Colin was singing in this really high, beautiful falsetto that was kind of piercing.”
The viewer’s misinterpretation became an opportunity for Cheung to have an interesting conversation with someone who otherwise would have had no idea about the exhibit, they said.
Cloaked in one of the robes was Nailah Clarke, a 21-year-old UF music composition junior.
Through the drawings on her robe, Clarke said she answered the question, “What are you carrying that’s too heavy to explain?”
She drew trophies, accolades and a person standing with awards in their hands, but the person wasn’t happy.
The performance was different from the ones she’s used to, Clarke said. It had a structured looseness that mirrored the children’s art.
Vocal games and improvisation played a large part in the performance, she said.
“It’s going to be good no matter what because there’s no really wrong way that you can do it,” she said. “I think that sort of embodied the spirit of the drawings.”
A lot of the words on the page were heavy and heartfelt, she said. When preparing for the performance, she tried to remember how she felt when she was the same age as the child artists.
“My first thought was, ‘Oh god, don’t mess this up,’” she said. “Connecting to the earnestness and honesty of it was the biggest thing for me.”
Musicians and non-musicians from the community came together and prepared for the performance in two days, Clarke said.
While the performers had a tight turnaround, Cheung took much longer to assemble the exhibit.
Gabby Byam, the managing director and education director at the Hippodrome, said Cheung spent three to four months completing the project.
Navigating a limited budget, Cheung obtained a grant and the proper materials for the project, Byam said.
During the camp workshops, Byam said Cheung was never trying to get a certain answer out of the kids.
“It definitely brought them into a space where they were able to speak with each other in a less guarded way,” she said.
It’s been a hard couple of years for the Hippodrome and the world as a whole, Byam said, but the artwork Cheung is committed to sharing is promising for the art community.
“If there’s something cool that we can see just for a second,” she said, “it’s like, there is beauty — there is hope.”
Contact Kendall O’Connor at koconnor@alligator.org.
Kendall O'Connor is a journalism senior at UF and the Fall 2026 lifestyle reporter. This is her second semester at The Alligator and first semester on The Avenue desk. Kendall loves reading, practicing yoga, making playlists and going to the movies.
