let the printed walls bleed out
Two-part Solo Exhibition \ LillStreet Art Center | Chicago | 2025
Together, Let the Printed Walls Bleed Out and A Vaulted Room for Future Feelings trace a movement from inherited and fixed cultural scripts toward the possibility of open, self-determined space. The first body of work confronts the permanence of mid-century dollhouse interiors—miniature worlds imprinted with the values and stereotypes of their time. The second imagines what might emerge if those walls were wiped clean, offering a vaulted room where curiosity and future feelings could take root. Seen together, these works ask how the past continues to shape us, and what might unfold if we dared to reimagine it.
For several years, I have been working with a particular brand of Sears tin-litho printed dollhouses, produced from the 1920s through the 1970s. I am fascinated by the miniature décor and objects permanently printed on the walls, reflecting the pop culture of their time.
To a child, the printed walls of a dollhouse suggest a predetermined set of choices about life.
The three-dimensional dollhouses and rooms are only slightly altered, serving as points of comparison within the exhibition. The repetition of their interiors is central to the history they carry. Multiple years of this house were printed with the same walls—a mass-market toy declaring “Princeton!” to generation after generation of children.
For this series of mixed-media paintings, I began by affixing one wall from the interior of a 1963 tin-litho dollhouse onto each canvas. Around each wall, I painted expanded versions of the interior scenes, taking abstracted liberties. The works are hung with careful attention to the negative space between them, expanding the distance between rooms to create a dialogue among the pieces.
The “exploded” visual of the 1963 Marx dollhouse walls begs to be reassembled, yet the tension resists resolution and prompts broader questions: What kinds of life pathways were already predetermined for children of my parents’ generation before they made a single decision for themselves? What elements of mid-century American pop culture continue to trickle down to children today? Details like the toy soldiers on the wallpaper of a child’s bedroom and the “his & hers” towels hung in the bathroom anchor this historical narrative.
In the Sears Marx dollhouses of the late 1960s and early 1970s, I study interiors that are eerily reminiscent of my grandmother’s home and those of her generation. I imagine my mother playing out her dreams within a toy house filled with predefined, immovable spaces.
When I make artwork from a Marx dollhouse, I know I am handling the very toys my mother’s generation once played with. In this artistic collaboration with these dollhouses, I oscillate between reverence for their historical significance and irreverence toward the stereotypes embedded in their miniature interiors. I wrestle with a frustrated desire to trace, with my fingertips, how American culture evolved from 1963 to where we are in 2025.
