BOULDER, Colo. (KDVR) — Nearly a year after the King Soopers tragedy, the Museum of Boulder is opening a new exhibit reflecting back on the tragic moment. 

The exhibit, called “Boulder Strong: Still Strong, Remembering March 2021,” features artifacts from the memorial outside the store, as well as photographs of 70 people in the community connected to what happened.

“It’s definitely more of a memorial, reflective exhibit than sort of your standard informational exhibit,” museum curator Chelsea Pennington Hahn said. 

She said she started working on the exhibit the day after the tragedy happened. 

“I’m trying to find that balance between this is my job,” she said. “I need to preserve and think about it through that curator lens but also I’m a person that lives in Boulder. This is my community.” 

Throughout the past year, Pennington Hahn and her team collected and preserved numerous artifacts from the memorial fence outside the grocery store. 

“Posters and papers, making sure that they had been up long enough that people could see them but also try to make sure they were not too damaged by the weather,” Pennington Hahn said. “These are going to get lost if we don’t do something so from then on out went probably weekly to gather things.”

The items chosen for the display include posters, messages, store receipts, a “road closed” sign, rocks painted with each victim’s name, and a length of cloth that was draped over the fence. 

“Just really wanting to provide a space for people to come and be able to remember not just that day but also the community’s response to it,” Pennington Hahn said. 

The exhibit also features a selection of portraits by photographer and CU Boulder assistant professor Ross Taylor. 

“They are our community,” he said of his subjects. “We have anywhere from the police chief, we have the store manager of the King Soopers, we have people who were inside the store at the time.”

He came up with the idea for a portrait project to help convey the ripple effect the shooting had on the community. 

There are photographs of less obvious community members too, including comfort dogs, prisoners who raised money to donate to victim families, journalists and a CU student that played his cello near the memorial fence. 

“He’s a CU Boulder student. He was at the store at the time. But was able to get out and then came back that week and played the cello in front of the King Soopers,” Taylor said. “I thought that was just a beautiful moment in the wake of such tragedy.”

Museum visitors will get to learn about the people in the photographs and the intent behind some of the artifacts curated from the memorial. 

The exhibit will run from Feb. 19th through April 10th.