Various photos by our very talented friend, Margaret Grzymkowski.

An important part of our mission to spark creativity in the communities we serve is providing independent working artists and writers opportunities to submit their work for solo and group exhibitions and to share their process and their work more publicly. But how to create something we could travel with when we are on the road?? One way to achieve that goal was to create an exhibition space that was small enough to carry along.

We both grew up playing with dollhouses. Amy’s father built her a replica of her childhood home, which she spent hours decorating well into her teenage years. She lovingly wallpapered the walls with scraps of wallpaper from her family’s home renovations, made wood floors out of popsicle sticks, and spent hours creating miniature bowls of fruit, birthday cakes, and teeny tiny handwritten newspapers (she was the writer and editor, of course!)

Maya’s grandmother had a replica of her Fort Lauderdale apartment custom-built for Maya and her sister when they were 5 and 6 years old. It featured a miniature grand piano in the living room, a miniscule game of checkers with movable pieces, and three color-coded bathrooms, complete with powder puffs and plush toilet-seat covers.

We are still obsessed with miniature worlds, and if you had that chance to experience our Tiny Book Show in 2016, you’ll know what we mean. During that cross-country creative adventure, we learned about Stephanie Rond of Columbus, Ohio. Stephanie is a prolific street artist who also created S. Dot Gallery in 2011. We’ve been watching her curate the walls of this dollhouse-sized gallery and make magic for years and hoped to one day start a miniature gallery of our own.

As providence would finally have it, we were driving to a meeting in Montclair, NJ in the winter of 2019 when we saw a wooden dollhouse sitting on the curb, waiting for the garbagemen to make their rounds. We screeched to a halt, gave it a once-over and found that it was in perfect condition. It looked handmade. We put in gently in the car, brought it home, and began plotting the next steps to make our dollhouse dream a reality. Since then a second dollhouse was donated to us by a friend and transformed into a gallery space by artist Ellen Hanauer.

The Itsy Bitsy Art Gallery may be diminutive but it still functions like a life-size gallery.

For Artists: We are currently looking for artists who would like to host a solo or group show on the walls of one of our dollhouses. We will accept 2D or 3D art  - painting, drawing, collage, mixed media, sculpture - but remember: It has to be very small! Each “resident” artist has access to all parts of the dollhouse. There are four main rooms and a large attic (or art studio) upstairs. There is also a hallway with plenty more wall space! The exhibitions will be on display in various locations and will also be housed and travel inside our vintage caravan when we are on the road. When our schedule allows, we’d love to be able to visit each artist's home location and encourage their community to engage with The Itsy Bitsy Art Gallery in a variety of ways, popping up at galleries, libraries, schools, farmer’s markets, breweries, restaurants/coffee shops, street festivals, and more. All artwork will be for sale unless the artist specifies otherwise. Our standard commission on sales is 30%.

For more information or to send us your proposal for an exhibition, please email us at [email protected]. Send a few examples of your work and a few sentences about why tiny art makes you happy! We look forward to your submissions and we hope to meet you somewhere soon.

For sponsors, venues, or community organizations: We are searching for spaces/people who would like to host The Itsy Bitsy Art Gallery or folks who would like to help us find a location in your community to host us. Please email us at [email protected] to discuss logistics and timing. Here is a sampling of what an event could look like:

We’ll share our Itsy Bitsy Art gallery with your group and facilitate a discussion including topics such as: 

• how we can practice taking small steps to help realize big dreams

• art is for everyone (not just artists and critics)

• why whimsy, play, and experimentation without a particular outcome in mind are so important to the creative process

• how to tap into the natural wonder we all had as children    

We then teach participants how to create their own miniature books or zines. We offer instructions for a variety of simple folds and structures, and encourage creative inspiration and ideas to fill the pages. This can be a timed & ticketed event or a continuous event on a rolling schedule where participants come as go as they please during the contracted time period. Usually 90 minutes to 2 hours. All materials are included. Cost: $250 for a 90-minute workshop.

OUR CURRENT ARTISTs IN RESIDENCE

“It is not everyday that an artist gets to create a solo exhibition in a space she has personally renovated, so when The Creativity Caravan gave me an old dollhouse to refurbish, I jumped at the chance.  My idea was to create a contemporary exhibition space for solo and group shows that would replicate the gallery experience in 1/12” miniature scale. I knew that as the first artist to show in this new space, I would include installations, ceiling, wall and floor mounts so that future artists could imagine using the space in all the ways they would in a full-size gallery. 

Unlike most of my solo exhibitions where I start with a floor plan, for this show I chose to experiment with various materials to see where they would take me. The challenge of working this small can’t be overstated - when making a print the size of a gumdrop or glazing a teeny sculpture, details can be wiped out in seconds. The resulting body of work was a self portrait in miniature of my process over the last thirty years — homage to the Divine Feminine, to the sciences, to fiber art, and to mixed media.

Ceramic sculpture, 3D drawings, fiber art, mixed media, mono prints and installations fill the bottom two floors of the gallery. In the attic, additional works of art and pedestals are kept in storage. I made a decision to eliminate all furniture from the gallery other than a chair and welcome desk so that viewers could get small, walk around, and immerse themselves in the work. Some of the pieces are interactive and there is an intended joyfulness in this work. 

It is my hope that viewers will take delight in the playfulness of the work and experience it all in a huge way.”

Ellen Hanauer
Ellen Hanauer Studios 
Riker Hill Art Park
Livingston, NJ
Instagram: ellenhanauer_
www.ellenhanauer.com

House + Wife (in miniature) is “an exhibition examining the identity of housewives, and the homes they cared for, as depicted through advertisements from 1930-1959.”

The role of the housewife in society has evolved drastically over the last 60 years. Many contributing factors have forced us to rethink the identity of the housewife. As an artist, I enjoy exploring the role of the 1930-1950’s housewife in ways that can help me forge my identity as a wife and mother. I appreciate the art of clever text and hand drawn lettering paired with sophisticated and simplistic illustrations of classic advertising. This love of advertising aesthetics has crossed over into my fine artwork.

What makes a house a home? Is it the wife- charged with its upkeep, or the objects that embody the space? This exhibition is the identity of both the “HOUSE+WIFE”.    

My intent is for viewers to look at the household objects on display and look past their obvious function, to ultimately see an extension of the housewife’s identity on the items that once socially defined her.

Evelyn Davis-Walker is a liberal artist who holds a B.A. from Otterbein University in Visual Communication and Computer Art and her M.F.A. in Advertising Design from Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She has taught as a full-time graphic design professor for over thirteen years (currently teaching at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia) in addition to working in commercial design for nearly twenty years. Her graphic design client list includes well-known non-profits such as the American Red Cross, Meals on Wheels, Big Brothers Big Sisters in addition to academic institutions such as Virginia Commonwealth University, Otterbein University and Valdosta State University. 

In 2010, Evelyn was awarded 25 for 25 AOL International Art Grant where 25 winners (9,000 applicants) were funded $25,000. Evelyn designed individual memory games for 200 Alzheimer’s patients. In 2015, Evelyn received the Otterbein University Young Alumni Recipient for Community Engagement. 

Along with her commercial design work, Evelyn has a strong affinity for all things paper – from mixed media collage, to creating typographical prints on her letterpress machine.

Evelyn Davis-Walker
Valdosta State University
Instagram: profdaviswalker
www.evelyndaviswalker.com

Our Past ArtistS in Residence

• Erica Pizza “Slow Down”

• Kathleen Heron: “At Home with the Artist Marcella Duchampion”