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| TRUST RESEARCH GRANT: MINIATURE ARCHITECTURE With generous support from the Decorative Arts Trust, Winterthur Fellow Nicholas R. Bell spent the summer of 2007 traveling to interview a series of artists who produce miniature buildings. His research reveals a strong connection between architecture and the artists’ biographies. Nicholas hopes that his study will enable a better understanding of the complex relationship between memory, miniaturization, and the built environment.
William Christenberry, now professor of art at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, was born and raised in Hale County, Alabama, the setting of the landmark book by Walker Evans and James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The ramshackle structures in those famous photographs were the landscape of Christenberry’s youth. He has always felt a deep connection to the buildings in this area and began photographing and painting them at a young age. He was paid perhaps his highest compliment by Evans himself, who described each photograph as a poem. Still, two-dimensional representations would seemingly not satisfy the artist. He confessed to a friend that his love for one church was so great that he felt the need to “possess” it. And so Christenberry began to replicate certain buildings in miniature and place them on damp plots of red Alabama soil, brought back to Washington by car.
When the long, sticky summers of the South unfurled over Beverly Buchanan’s youth, she was not always left to play in the yard of her South Carolina home. Sometimes, to gain a better sense of hard work, she was sent to the tobacco barns of the North Carolina piedmont, where she spent her days as a ‘hander,’ picking through worm-eaten leaves. The experience had more than a disciplinary effect on her. Decades later, as an established artist living in New York city and Athens, Georgia, Buchanan began to build pedestal-sized shacks and buildings out of whatever materials were available—clay, foam-core, wooden crates and tin. She did not connect this work to her past until, once, while driving through North Carolina, her passenger pointed to a tobacco barn and exclaimed, “that looks like one of your houses!”
Kevin Sampson, a retired police officer now living in the Ironbound district of Newark, New Jersey, explains that building was always a part of his life. As a child, he followed his landlord father around neighborhood apartment blocks, helping to patch repairs with whatever materials could be scrounged. Sampson first started making small buildings, among other sculptures, after a series of family tragedies left him searching for a way to heal. He began to scavenge junk from the streets and abandoned structures of his neighborhood to create houses, loading docks, fire stations, and the cathedral of St. John the Divine out of materials as diverse as rags, sticks and bones. Over the last two years, I learned about the work of each of the above artists individually. While it was not immediately clear, I felt strongly that something other than the size of the architecture must bind this work together. The generosity of the Decorative Arts Trust allowed me to travel from Newark to Ann Arbor, and to schedule an upcoming trip to Washington to meet each artist and discuss with them their work and the various ways in which they have experienced architecture. In the course of my interviews,
I have been able to establish clear links between each artist’s formative years and the architectural landscapes in which those years were spent. I have also observed that each artist uses these structures to tell stories, both about their own lives and about the people that might live in them, real or imagined. In this sense, the buildings are both autobiographical and mythical. More poignant has been my realization that the artists do not construct their works to simply remember history, but to preserve it. The shacks, stores and churches of Buchanan’s and Christenberry’s South are gradually succumbing to the elements and to development. Sampson, meanwhile, watches helpless, as Newark is bulldozed all around him. Evident in these vivid constructions is a complex web of human emotions. I hope that by undertaking this study, I will be better able to convey why miniature architecture plays an important role in understanding our relationship with the built environment. Nicholas would like to thank members of the Decorative Arts Trust for their support and encouragement. He is more than happy to discuss his research. He can be reached at: nicholas.r.bell@gmail.com
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