The title of this exhibition is borrowed from an anthology of American literature edited by Ralph Woods, brother of Mary Elizabeth Woods Lightfoot. The Woods were a family of writers—journalists, ghost writers, authors, and editors who understood the power of language to shape meaning. In 1948, Mary Woods married William Oliver Lightfoot. Together they raised six children, and since then, two more generations of Lightfoots have come into the world—each carrying forward a legacy of making.

Mary was known to say, "I don't have a creative bone in my body." The evidence suggests otherwise. What she birthed was not a lineage of professional artists, but something rarer: a family of makers compelled to create alongside the demands of work, parenthood, and daily life. Most show up without ever showing. All step back from convention to forge something new because they are made to do so. It is, quite certainly, in their bones.

The Lightfoot family members in this exhibition include commercial artists, jewelers, nurses, contractors, teachers, poets, painters, fiber artists, furniture makers, sculptors, and surfboard builders. Very few have shown publicly before, yet all are prolific in what they make. They are artists by life—foraging, assembling, painting, and building in the margins of careers and family obligations. Treasury of the Familial gathers their work as evidence of what compulsion looks like across a lifetime, and what gets passed down when making is woven into the fabric of daily existence.

As sisters who have built Verse together, we recognize something of ourselves in the Lightfoot family's creative inheritance. The act of making—whether jewelry, surfboards, textiles, or the space that holds them—is both solitary and collaborative, passed between generations and across workbenches.

We share a vision of Verse as more than a gallery: it is a platform for regional artists and makers whose work is rooted here, made now, deserving of wider recognition and activated by community. In curating Treasury of the Familial, we celebrate not only the Lightfoot lineage but the larger truth that sustaining a creative practice alongside the rest of life is itself an act of resistance, devotion, and inheritance. This is the work we believe in—and the work we are honored to share.