Tiny Little Things: On dollhouses, miniatures, and the stories objects tell.

Tiny Little Things:

On dollhouses, miniatures, and the stories objects tell.

How did it even start? I remember my mother taking a miniatures class and making the most mouth-wateringly perfect layer cakes and pies with Fimo and bottle caps. She had a tiny punch hook tool and some stencils for beautiful rugs, and then there were hand-tufted rugs, in miniature.

Was it 5th grade? Something like that. A classmate of mine and I and a 6th grade student would all walk together north on Clark Street one day a week after school to go to Mrs. Enck’s house. (Mrs. Enck is a real person. If you’re reading this, thank you for sharing your artistry with us all!) Her house was one of those Chicago Northside gems: a townhouse tucked away between storefronts and apartment buildings. Inside was all dim lights, dark wood, flocked wallpaper, and impressive stairs up to her third floor atelier. She might have even called it that–“atelier.” She definitely said “et voila!” when unveiling anything impressive, which was always.

We made tiny rooms out of foamcore and pearl-headed pins and contact paper. We made bassinets out of old plastic bottles and lace and cotton batting. I think some of these things are still in my mother’s house, along with her tiny rugs and furniture.

Walking 6 blocks on a busy city street in the 1980s was a joy for a ten year old. We would stop into Walgreen’s and get Snickers bars to eat along the way. Clark Street was full of stores and restaurants and places to window-shop.

And Clark Street was full of people living on the sidewalk, too. The rise of deinstitutionalization–of moving people out of often-oppressive and unfair incarceration in mental hospitals–and the rest of the dawning of Ronald Reagan’s

morning in America was visible on the street: people hunched over subway grates under plastic sheets with bags of their belongings. Men and women in layers of old clothing looking for cans. I was young. I didn’t understand the structural forces behind what I saw, but I was terrified. With the pure heart and naivete of a privileged kid, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. How could this happen? How could I leave my private school, walk a few blocks to an elegant townhouse to work on making beautiful tiny things and homes of people’s dreams, and in between see the reality of poverty and violence and institutional abandonment?

This is part of the backstory of dollhouses and dioramas, I think: we make a better world in miniature at least partly to right the wrongs of our current reality.

We also make tiny things because they’re fun. Because they’re cute! Because then we feel like giants. There are so many reasons.

But this is my story of what I remember, and the simultaneous thrill and terror of making miniatures in the face of rising homelessness.

And so the chance to make a zine and curate an art show and host hands-on workshops with the Philly Tiny Little Collective (me, Gina Renzi, and Alison Miner) means remembering that making miniatures can also mean addressing major problems, so let’s try to keep making the world we want to see, in cardboard and clay and real life, too.

Carolyn Chernoff

The title of the book "Little Altars Everywhere" could be the name of Jacinta's house, even though her house already has a name, "Double Infinity." Around every corner lies a new surprise shelf of ever-changing collected objects which have caused some people to claim that her house is a museum or that they would like to book a few more hours taking in the remarkable collection.

Jacinta Bunnell

@jacintabunnell

Small Worlds: Strawberryland

On the morning of my eleventh birthday, there was a giant present waiting for me in the “good room,” and my parents had led me to believe it was a sewing machine. I knelt in front of the parcel and sighed, preparing myself to fake joy but when I tore the wrapping paper, I saw that what was inside was a Strawberry Shortcake Berry Happy Home.

If I’d had the language at that time, I would have identified as non-binary, but this was the 1980s. It was a confusing time, and I dealt with it by lying in the bath after school and reading Judy Blume novels for hours. I’d never been into dolls before, but I was obsessed with Strawberry Shortcakes. Each doll was named after a dessert, and had a dessertnamed pet; each doll had the strong scent of that dessert. The premise of the toy line was that the dolls lived in Strawberryland and spent their days making and sharing desserts. There were two camp and magnificent villains— Sour Grapes and the Purple Pie Man—who tried to rob the kids’ cakes and pies, so they also needed to spend their days defending their desserts. This was the sort of imagined future I could live for. I felt that, if my gender were any single thing, it was Strawberry Shortcake.

At eleven, I knew that most of my friends had moved on to ask for stereos for their birthdays. I had asked for this dollhouse for my birthday only once, a few months earlier, because I was embarrassed. I knew I was too old for dolls and I also knew it cost a few hundred dollars, much more than my parents could afford. Somehow, my parents had

intuited how much I wanted it, had got the money together for the dollhouse and had then snuck it into the house. Somehow, they didn’t think it was ridiculous that their tall and unusual child wanted a giant plastic dollhouse.This thing is huge. I still have it. It lives in the bedroom I share with my extremely patient partner. Due to the miracles of 1980s plastic manufacturing, it is still shiny and bright. Two whole shelves of our built-in wardrobe are also packed with Strawberry Shortcake dolls, sealed new in their boxes, in neat rows. I also have playsets and spin-offs. I’ve joined a number of Facebook groups where people post photos of their dolls, sell and buy them, and talk about their love for the Berry Happy Home. The origin stories have two main themes: class and gender. Many of the people now obsessed with Strawberry Shortcake never had them as children, because their parents couldn’t afford them. There are also a number of queer and nonbinary people who couldn’t have them as children because they were considered the wrong gender. Some people make customised dolls, and I’ve bought a few extraordinary dolls from a guy in Michigan, who has re-imagined a whole line of new dolls. Every now and then someone will post a photo in the group: “I’ve found one!” and they’ll proudly show a photo of their first Berry Happy Home, sourced from a thrift store or Marketplace.

Honni van Rijswijk @honnivanrijswijk

Sour Grapes and The Purple Pieman with Berry Bird, Kenner, 1981

Dollhouses of Radial Defiance

Making miniatures is rebellion. Conventional wisdom says that miniaturists want to create small worlds in order to gain a sense of control, to play “god” in a tiny invented world. I posit that it is instead an act of humility, one of quietude, attentiveness, and patience that is hard to reconcile with the breakneck speed our culture has adopted. Time spent making miniatures is not about control of other worlds, but about crafting a willful pace for ourselves and those who join us. I liken it to a prayer in a winding labyrinth: walking a labyrinthine pattern is not about getting from one place to another efficiently, but about being present in each slow, deliberate step. Choosing mindfulness over efficiency flies in the face of our cultural values, so that is commonly misunderstood.

It’s easy to see that in the full-scale world our collective attention spans are growing shorter. People read far fewer books and other long-form texts in favor of articles, Twitter threads, short clips of text, and “listicles.” News cycles speed up so quickly that each day’s disaster gets replaced by another before anyone has had time to process and grieve the first. In our online lives, text and photos have given way to constant videos and reels, often with the punchlines or resolutions truncated to a mere fraction of a second. Our social media platforms support shorter, faster, continually more sped-up content.

And yet, in this world of hubbub, stubborn miniaturists hunch over worktables pouring countless hours into details that will only be observable to those who slow down, take their time, and look closely. That seems a radical, beautiful

act of defiance. Making miniatures requires opting into a new scale of time as well as scale of size. In miniature, things move slowly: it takes tweezers and a delicate hand to produce crafts that have already been perfected in full scale. We have to measure, to dry fit, to adjust, and then measure again. We have to invent processes, and even new tools. We teach ourselves new techniques, and start again. We drop things on the floor…and start again.

Engaging in this art form is an act of protecting and defending our own attention span, and demanding similar engagement from others. You can not take in an entire dollhouse as a work of art in a moment, or in a single sweeping glance. A dollhouse project will not reveal itself to you while you remain passive, like a video with plot points spelled out in sequence. You will have to let your eyes wander from room to room, peeking through doorways, around furniture, even, in many cases, poking around in drawers. (I know I’m not the only one who stashes secret treasures inside drawers, boxes, and canisters.) A dollhouse tells a narrative that demands the observer to work to participate. The miniaturist leads us through a story, but it’s not linear and can’t be interpreted in a moment.

In the social media community, miniature makers are collectively building a culture that asks us to deliberately put on the brakes. It requires us to slow down, lean in, watch closely. Today, someone is laying a small floor in an impossibly complex parquet pattern. Over here, someone else is taking time to piece together an entire quilt one tiny stitch at a time. Over there, they’re building ten layers of paint to make a surface look like it’s been weathering for a hundred years. These are tasks of patience and attentiveness.

The defiance of dollhouse-makers is financial as well: capitalism demands that artists constantly monetize our free time, that we make everything we do “productive” and add value. The miniature community sees this as well—the public perception is that if a person labors at an endeavor, the results must automatically be up for sale. And yet dollhouses often are valued at far less than the sum of their parts. Estate sales readily show that a completed, furnished dollhouse brings in more in sales when the furniture is separated from its house, because most people prefer creating their own environments rather than adopting someone else’s vision. And yet, dollhouse makers continue

“Protest”

Julie Steiner

to labor on, pouring countless hours into projects that frequently bring no financial reward. To labor for love at any task of production is nearly unheard of in our culture today. And yet…in craft rooms, converted basements, and kitchen tables all over the world, we steadily pursue the perfect shingle pattern, the right dado rail and crown molding combination, or the precisely curved cabriole chair leg.

We are, collectively, forcing ourselves to slow down, step aside, get out of the rat race, for at least as long as we are engaged in our craft. “Watching paint dry” is the idiom for doing the most boring thing possible, and yet here we are, engaging in projects layered with drying paint and glue, and not only that: taking pictures of it, and sharing it with others, so that we can all share these slow, deliberate steps with one another. We watch and encourage each other, admiring the difference between the 8th layer of paint and the 9th, sitting vigil with each other waiting for 3D printers to complete their circuit or for supplies to arrive in the mail from elusive sources, we join each other in long lists of “willfully boring” activities that say “slow down, take a moment, look closely, pay attention, wait.”

In the face of our “hurry up” culture, making miniatures is a most delicious act of willful, radical defiance.

Julie Steiner

“Objects Out of Scale”

Who Built The Thorne Rooms?

Downstairs from the Michigan Avenue entrance, near the photography department and the bathrooms, a quiet set of tiny dioramas attract thousands of visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago every year. They come to feast their eyes on the Thorne miniature rooms, a beloved Chicago institution whose creation was planned and overseen in the 1920s and 30s by Mrs. Narcissa Niblack Thorne.

Narcissa was the wife of James Ward Thorne, an executive at the well-known mail-order supplier and department store Montgomery Ward. As her husband’s family business sold kit houses and the furnishings to go in them, Mrs. Thorne developed a parallel, high-end practice that was the antithesis of the mass-produced consumer commodities the Ward catalogue sold. In a small studio in their (surely wellappointed house) on Prairie Avenue, she oversaw the creation of over 100 dioramas representing rooms in historic houses with punctiliously reconstructed interior designs. 68 of them are now at the Art Institute.

Though it’s easy to assume from the way the rooms are presented at the Art Institute that Mrs. Thorne crafted them entirely with her own hands, she didn’t. Her family fortune allowed her to hire architects, carpenters, and textile workers to create the rooms to her taste. The invisibility of labor is notable in these rooms. There are no people. Some of the rooms offer a glimpse of a meal or a task in progress. But there are no owners relaxing or dining, and no servants or slaves providing the labor that makes it all happen.

And it would, in fact, be a matter of slaves. A large proportion of the American Thorne Rooms cannot be divested from slavery. As with architectural tours of Southern plantations—at least up until recently, when some have changed their approach—to amputate human life from these scenes is also to glorify the architecture and design at the expense of the people whose labors made it possible. It could be true of almost any of the Northern rooms too, but it’s especially apparent for the Southern rooms, whose luxury depends directly on vast quantities of plantation labor. In the Thorne rooms there’s a particular obsession with Virginia— more rooms than any other state, and most of them from houses where hundreds of people at a time were enslaved, where enslaved people literally built the houses that so inspired Mrs. Thorne. The Maryland Dining Room is from a house built by enslaved people. The Virginia Dining Room (1758) is based on a house where 300 people were enslaved. The Georgia double parlor, designed partly in imitation of interiors from Gone With the Wind, boasts “Blackamoor” statues in classical garb bearing planters on their heads.

The 1920s and 30s may have been the heyday of period rooms, but they were also the heyday of racially restrictive covenants in White Chicago that confined Black Chicagoans to a few overcrowded neighborhoods where they were packed into “kitchenette” apartments. Like Mrs. Thorne, the character Sallie, in Gwendolyn Brooks’s epic poem “In the Mecca,” “want[s] to decorate.” Sadly her interior monologue rebukes her: “But what is that? A pomade atop a sewage. An offense. First comes correctness, then embellishment!” on where Black Chicagoans could live, Mrs. Thorne built her tiny monuments to genteel Southern slaveholding life. She fetishized décor and structure at the expense of honest history. Perhaps she was of her time (and class, and race, and gender), but we do not have to be.

If the institution won’t reframe (or commission an artist to reframe) these spaces, I suggest a volunteer intervention is in order. Along with homes belonging to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson, the Southern houses that inspired Mrs. Thorne include the Hammond-Harwood, Gunston Hall, Carter’s Grove, and Wilton plantations. Google any of them and you will find that the organizations that run these historic buildings have begun, to a greater or lesser degree, to acknowledge the violence of slavery. If they can reckon with their own history, shouldn’t the Art Institute and the Thorne Rooms?

Rebecca Zorach @rabbitrez

“The Virginia Dining Room” (1758)

What Do Objects Want to Be?

An Interview with Gina Renzi

Talk to me about Dollhouse Gina. How did this whole thing start?

Dollhouse Gina. So. My grandparents on my dad’s side gave me a dollhouse when I was 7 or 8 or something, I don’t really know, and I’m sure that I liked dollhouses before that, but I don't really have a lot of memories of them or anything. But I remember them giving me this dollhouse, and they made it from a kit, and it was–I still have it–and it’s beautiful. It’s 3 floors, and there was also a little carriage house that eventually I made into the dining room and the parents’ bedroom above it. But they made one for me and one for one of my cousins. We were very close in age. And then they gave them to us–I guess it was Christmas, I don't know–but my grandfather, his name was Sam. He was extremely handy and he saved everything. In his garage he would have all these different tubs and drawers and stuff, and they would say things like “Baby Carriage Wheels” or like “Eyes” or like, whatever, and he just had all this kind of stuff. I don't think we ever talked about it at all, but he definitely inspired me to be kind of somebody who looks at things in all different ways and tries to kind of salvage things and make things out of them, which eventually is where kind of Dollhouse Gina came in, where I would make furniture out of trash and stuff.

But anyway.

So they gave me this dollhouse and my grandmother Margaret, who just passed away in February, she was also incredibly handy and crafty, and so she could sew anything, knit, crochet–she made people’s wedding gowns, she made

people’s curtains for their entire house, you know, she would do all these things, and sometimes she would charge people, like if she made a baby blanket or something, but most of the time it was just gifts. And so she sewed all these little lace curtains for the dollhouse. Every single window. And each of them had a little satin sash so you could part the curtains in the middle, and a lot of those curtains are still in that dollhouse, and she covered the walls with contact paper that had all of these kind of garish pink flowers, and then some of the rooms had yellow flowers, and she covered all the floors with this like wood-grain looking contact paper. And then she crocheted an area rug for each room. And so I still have most of the rugs. I don’t have all of them anymore.

And then they bought some furniture and my grandparents on the other side bought some furniture. So they gave me this dollhouse. And over the years I kind of just did whatever. Like, I covered the walls with construction paper. I made furniture. I made little accessories. I think a lot of people have this, but I always had this eye for just, you know, seeing something on the floor, some random metal ball or something, and being like, “that’s a bowl!” or whatever, and I kind of never really lost that. So over the years I would play with this house and I would make things for it and make pillows out of cotton balls or whatever.

Eventually my grandmother tried to teach me how to crochet and that did not go well. But many many many years later I learned how to knit. And i knit some area rugs and some blankets and stuff, and i showed her my work, and she was–she was happy that i was doing it, but she was also–she critiqued a lot, and one of the last times i had a really good conversation with her before she passed, she critiqued some knitting that I did. And she told me I needed to learn certain

stitches or something and I went home and googled them. I couldn’t do them from memory but I wrote them all down and if I follow that I can see what she was telling me to do. So that kind of stuff is still there.

But at some point she had some miniatures of her own, and I don't remember when, but she had–somebody gave her this miniature sewing machine and a dress form and like all these things that had to do with sewing. And she had them in her curio cabinet, and I would stare at them all the time when we would visit. And fast-forward to now: she passed away and not too long ago my mother brought out a bag and it was all that stuff. She said “Grandmom said ‘Make sure Gina gets this.’” But! She said, “Grandmom said you cannot give it away.” Because they know I give everything away.

So I have that stuff now. She liked that kind of stuff. She didn’t really make a whole lot of it but she admired it, and she always said that I took such good care of the dollhouse that they gave me, and that my cousin that they gave a similar one to didn’t take care, so…they put us against each other a little bit. But it wasn’t hurtful. Little kids, whatever. You don’t always know how to take care of things like that.

Sure. But from an early age you were clearly a steward of the dollhouse.

Yeah.

I wonder, do you think this connects? I know you had sort of an alternate past career or training in architecture. Do you think any of these things connect?

Yeah, definitely. I love architecture, but I realized my first year at Drexel as an architecture student that I did not want to be an architect. I had no interest in designing buildings

that humans would be in. I was more interested in the models. And I didn't understand that. It was so silly. Like, how did I not get that? I didn’t get it until I was actually there and then I was like, well, wait. What do I do? Do I study dollhouses? And I went on to study art history. But what I’m really interested in now and what I've been interested in for a long time is gathering people and making worlds, like we’ve talked about. I kind of feel like it all sort of fits into this kind of dollhouse/miniatures kind of idea, where you’re looking at a world, you’re thinking about it, you’re playing make-believe. You’re thinking about, what would this person say? How does the person do it? Not all kids do that, you know. I’ve had niblings, for example, where I’ll say “let’s play dolls” and they can’t come up with any dialog. Some kids are just different like that. So I think, like, thinking about that stuff really grew my empathy and it also really made me think about these different worlds. Different scenarios and stuff.

Did a family live in the dollhouse your grandparents gave you? If you played in it, what did you play? Who lived there? What did they do?

I think it was my mother’s parents who gave me the people, and they were very very realistic looking. They weren't just like plastic, painted-on clothing, or whatever. They actually had like real clothes. I just kind of acted out scenarios that were just me trying to mirror or figure out things that were happening in my own house. The parents coming home from work, and the kids eating, and like, taking the dog out. There wasn't anything too fantastical, you know, but then as I got older I lost the people, or like, somebody's head fell off or whatever. They just went away. And I was never really interested in having people so much after that. It was more

about arranging rooms and looking through windows. More like the artistic element. Like seeing how the light hits certain things, and then imagining scenarios in my head, but not acting them out with dolls. More like acting them out with furniture.

Tell me about how this morphed in the pandemic. You started posting things on Facebook. What was the journey like, and how did people respond?

I was trying to remember, what was it? What day was that, or how did it happen, but I–when Scott and I bought our house in–whatever that was. ‘07 or something. This dollhouse from my grandparents first was on the first floor, pretty much right as soon as you walked in. And I wanted people to see it. And then eventually it went up to the third floor to my office kind of catchall room. “Gina’s Playroom” is what we called it. ‘Cause I would go up there and listen to records or maybe do yoga and like, play with my dollhouse. And then honestly, like so many people, I got so so so so busy. Like, right before the pandemic I remember thinking, “oh my god, i can’t go on this way.” Like, with my job and everything. It’s way too much. I don’t know what’s going to happen. And then like a lot of other folks, I was told to stay home. And I had a month between lockdown and when we did our first virtual event for work. So I had a lot of time, like a month, where I was just home. And I was not working for most part. I was communicating with people about event cancellations and trying to, you know, comfort people, but I wasn’t planning any events and I wasn't working. And thankfully, still getting paid, unlike a lot of people. So I kind of felt comfortable for once. And I think it made a huge difference.

Like so many people, I baked bread, or I cleaned out the drawers or whatever, and then one day, I just was like, I'm going to go up to the third floor and I'm just going to look at this dollhouse. Then I thought, I’m going to change all the

wallpaper. And so I started downloading–like, I paid for some wallpaper designs on etsy, and I did the same thing with floor designs, and printed them on glossy paper so it looked like shiny hardwood floors. And then I was like, I’m going to really rethink some of this furniture, and I'm going to repair some things. And now I actually have time to repair some things. I’m going to make that lamp, and it needs a base, and I'm going to use a penny for that base. Just, whatever

And so I started posting on Facebook to share with people, and I honestly–I should've known, but I honestly did not know people would be as interested as they were. People were so into it,

because it was just fun, it was childhood, it was wonderment, it was like, you know, it was just fantasy. It was all these different things, but also it was just really cute and like, I don’t know, all these people who had no idea I was so into this were so into this and wanted to talk about it, and wanted to talk about their dollhouses, or how they always wanted one and never could because they had cats, you know? And so I started doing that. I was posting about this particular dollhouse, but I only had one at the time.

And my friend Ruchama said, “Do you want this dollhouse that I’m going to give away to somebody and it’s from my childhood. There’s nothing in it. There’s no furniture and no wall coverings, nothing. Do you want it?” And I was like, yeah, yeah, I’ll take it. I don’t know. And I took it and I really ended up taking it super-seriously. Like, I primed the walls with real primer. I downloaded all these different wallpaper designs. And I was like, I don’t have any furniture. What am I going to do? And I just started looking in the trash–we don’t really have a lot of trash in our house because we recycle and we compost things, so I was mostly looking in the recycling, and then I was looking through old jewelry. Like, can I use this stuff as chandeliers? I just really enjoyed it.

If you think about it, it was so freeing and so rare, because there was no deadline. I didn’t monetize it. There was no client. There was no customer. I was just like, I’m just going to do this for fun, like when you’re a child, and you're just playing, and it doesn’t matter how it looks. It doesn't matter, like–I wanted it to come out this way and now it didn’t; well, now I'm going to go with it and see how it comes out. I’m going to get a toilet paper core and I'm going to make an office chair. And I'm going to use that old case from my

glasses that looks like leather, and I'm going to cover it so it looks like a leather chair! Of course I’m going to do that! Like, why would I not? I’m going to use a straw for like, the trunk of an upright lamp. You know.

So I just started doing it. I was creative and it was just fun, people were into it–I’m mostly done with that house. That house actually has people, I will tell you. The Golden Girls live there.

Now, is it a version of their house from the show? Or is it just, the Golden Girls live in this house that is a different house?

It’s just these little figures. They’re like little FunkoPops, but the ones that are really small, and it’s just the four Golden Girls. They're just in the house, and just living their lives. I don’t move them around. Sofia’s in the kitchen, Blanche is in the bedroom–

Mm-hmm.

They're in the rooms that correspond to their personalities. And it’s just fun. So that house is in our living room, and so when people come in they see it, and there are still some things I want to do with it. It needs a bunch of new shingles that will be made out of cardboard. It needs a front door.

So it’s just like owning a West Philly house. Right.

You put new shingles on your house roof, you put new shingles on the dollhouse roof…

But at some point my friend Linda offered me her mother’s dollhouse. And her mother passed away in December 2020 of Covid. So this was still my pandemic project kind of evolving. So it was some time–I don’t remember when. It was several months after that when Linda brought the dollhouse to me. It was completely unpainted. No furniture. Dog hair. You know, whatever. I did my whole little ritual of vacuuming it with a tiny vacuum attachment, and like, spraying it down with vinegar, and just like going for it, and I really put a ton of work into that one. I painted a lot of things, and I made an actual room on the third floor, and I made plants out of toilet paper cores that I wrapped in floral tape and twisted so they look like these big leaves and stuff, and I bought furniture for that one. Because I wanted it to look a little more pristine.THat’s the one that Ronald McDonald House took.

So that one’s gone, but now I have another one that somebody alerted me to a few months ago. Scott and I went and picked it up in the neighborhood. There were some spiders living in it and I relocated them. But I've done very little work on it because I'm busy with my job.

But anyway, that’s Dollhouse Gina, I think! There’s probably a lot more to it.

These are beautiful stories. If you had–dream big, now–if you had a chunk of time and comfort, do you have kind of a dream dollhouse project?

One thing that I thought a lot about is making a Rotunda. A mini-Rotunda. [The Rotunda is where Gina works. It’s a beautiful, historically-significant building with a literal rotunda.]

We have to do it.

So that would be one thing. I don’t know. I have no woodworking skills at all so I'd like to learn some things. All these things that I did, I used Exacto knives, utility knives, regular scissors, just stapling things. I did sew a bunch of things and knit some things, but I wouldn't say that any of them were really precise or pristine or anything like that. So I'd like to hone that stuff.

No. I’ve thought about the fact that most dollhouses you see all over the world, but especially in this country ,are pretty much the same. Pretty Eurocentric. We love the Victorian dollhouse, but like, what is it like to look at other decor in other cultures? So I've thought about what is it like in a traditional Japanese house with screens and mats on the floor and actual futons and things like that. That would be cool.

I also kind of would love to do a West Philly coop house, with like, very late 90s crunchy-granola coop.

Yeah. With raccoons in the house and the toilet in the kitchen like Knot Squat had.

A band practicing in the basement, and a whole bunch of–where the kitchen looks more like a science lab than a kitchen. So I don't know. I’m not sure. But what I have found is I also really like, like with the house Ruchama gave me, which I’ve nicknamed the Trash House, I like not having any sort of plan or expectation, and just being like, OK, here’s a tofu container. What shape–what does it want to be? OK, I’m going to make a sofa out of this. OK, I have this fabric that looks very East Asian. OK, that’s what it’s going to be.

And that actually went into a living room that ended up–some people refer to it as a 70s living room, which wasn’t at all my goal, but if you look at it it looks super-70s.

So just seeing what objects want to be, I think, is a huge thing. And I have to say, all this wrapped up into practicing mindfulness more,and thinking about my environment, and how I respond to my environment. That’s probably what I was doing all along, playing with the dollhouse, but now it’s more like, what is this object’s other life? It’s no longer the tofu container. What is it now?

It’s been pretty deep for me, actually, And it’s very restorative and therapeutic and I need to get back to it, because I haven’t been doing it for the last several months.

We talked about how my grandmother just passed and how she kind of started this off. One thing that was really cool about her, you know, we never talked at all about meditation, mindfulness, none of those words. But she spent long periods of time working with her hands. Knitting something. Crocheting something. And thinking about what an object wanted to be without really putting that into words per se.

And I think the other thing about her that was really cool that I feel I was inspired by and that somehow filters down into this project, this whole Dollhouse Gina thing, is that she was used to making do with very very little. Like, she would tell you all the time, “When I was a kid, we had to make our own dolls. We had to stand in line for shoes.” It was like her life. She was born in 1921. She remembered the Great Depression, for example. So she really was about not throwing things away. Like, everybody sort of joked around about her and my grandfather that they used duct tape and milk jugs for everything.

Well, yeah!

And I really really picked that up from them. So I think that when I started making things out of whatever I could find,

out of found objects, it was about a whole lot of things, but I feel that in a way I was really channeling both of them. My grandfather was gone at that point but she was still around, and I was able to tell her about this, and she was really happy to hear what I was doing. She lived with my aunt and uncle, and I texted my aunt some pictures when we weren’t able to visit yet because it was the pandemic, and I said “Make sure Grandmom sees these!” And she said, “Oh, she’s so happy that you’re doing all this,” and I feel like she probably got a lot out of the fact that I was doing this.

But also, yeah, it was about looking at what you have and not thinking so much about what else I want to have. I've never been very materialistic, and I like to salvage things. They were just hugely inspirational in that, and I feel like in some way, if I were looking back and writing a book about this, it would probably start with that dollhouse. And then after that, being sort of attuned to what they were doing, like, “Why does Grandpop save those wheels from doll carriages? Oh! Because he puts them on his recycling can because it’s too heavy to take out! Now he can roll it out.”

Just such smart people. People who didn't go to college or anything like that. Just such smart people. Maybe the next house I’ll name after them, or there will be a room that reminds me of a room in their house.

Were they Renzis?

They were Renzis, and they actually had a plaque outside their house that said Renzi. Maybe a house will have that too.

Interview with Gina Renzi by Carolyn Chernoff

About the Artists & Authors

Jacinta Bunnell (@jacintabunnell) is a self-taught artist and writer living in the Hudson Valley, NY. She works in many mediums: paint, video, words, performance, and textiles. She lives in a 200-year old farmhouse ornamented with small treasures she has collected on her way through this life and its many encounters. Her children's book A More Graceful Shaboom explores a vast miniature world that opens up when the main character discovers that their new purse is a portal to another world.

Carolyn Chernoff (@ccriot, @dollhousediorama) is a cultural worker and public sociologist in Philadelphia.

Bee Grissinger (@beezlebub_art; they/them) from Lancaster PA, with a recent BFA from PA College of Art and Design is a non-binary artist whose main mediums are printmaking, sculpture, and mixed media collage. Their work focuses on the themes of childhood nostalgia, growing up and finding your own personal identity. They have been featured in shows with Creative York, Core Gallery, and Fine Print Magazine. They are also looking into artist residency programs and grad school opportunities for the future.

Liz Krick (@lizkrick) studied at the Tyler School of Art, painting with oil and acrylic.

Honni Van Rijswjik (@honnivanrijswijk) loves Strawberry Shortcake. She is a law professor and dystopian queer YA author who lives in Australia.

Julie Steiner (@ridiculoustinythings)is a museum professional by day and an avid crafter in a wide range of media by night, investigating making things continually smaller and smaller. She has been sewing and making needlecrafts since childhood and is thrilled to relearn her favorite activities in miniature scales.

Kate VanVliet (@kvanvliet; she/her) is a sculptor and printmaker practicing from her home studio in Elkins Park and at BYO Print in Philadelphia. She studied fine arts at Moore College of Art & Design before co-founding BYO Print in 2010; BYO Print is a collective studio for emerging and established independent printmakers. She was a resident at Vermont Studio Center in 2017 and the 2018-2019 printmaker in residence at Cheltenham Arts Cener. She occasionally teaches workshops about using reclaimed objects in an art practice, and teaches non-toxic printmaking at Cheltenham Arts Center.

Rebecca Zorach (@rabbitrez) is a professor of art history. She lives in Chicago.

About the Doll/House Project & the Tiny Little Collective

The Doll/House Project (@dollhousediorama) is a series of public workshops, a gallery show, and a zine looking at dollhouses, dioramas, and miniature things in general. The idea started when Gina Renzi (@ginamrenzi) began posting photos of her dollhouse projects during the pandemic. Carolyn Chernoff (@ccriot) hatched a plan to share the joy of making tiny things with everyone in Philly. She and Gina were joined by Alison Miner (@tubinitron), who was planning to resurrect the Philly punk house Diorama-Rama of some decades past. Together at the Tiny Little Collective, we try to get people doing and making things together, because doing and making things with other people is sweet.

Special thanks to Kimberly Mitchell, Erin McLeary, Ashley Brown, Amanda D’Amico, Casey Miller, the teen sensations: Raven, Lucia, and Oona, and everyone out there doing the most with the least and doing their best to create hope in (and out of) a box.