Inside the Curious World of Miniatures | Backstory with Larry Potash

The world is a big place and we'll never be able to explore it all, but perhaps we can bring the world to us by making it smaller. Home for the holidays, a picture-perfect dining room, cozy corners to read a book, but in a way it's all an illusion. I think that there's something uncanny and exciting about being able to shrink the world around us into miniature. There is no one way to create a world of miniatures. Elegant, mundane, whimsical. It's just something that you look at closely and you're like, oh my god, this is so cool. Look at the details. How is this possible? It looks like it was shrunk. It's hard to imagine the hand behind it. Some of these works of art sell for six figures. They certainly look like dollhouses, just don't call them toys. Carol Summerfield is the executive director of the History Center of Lake Forest. Kids love it because it feels like toys, but it's so much richer than that. And adults love it because every one of these rooms tells a story. You know, it's like breathing life into a painting and I think that that engages everybody. In recent years, miniatures have become huge. During COVID, when people are looking for a hobby, people find miniatures on social media. The world's biggest miniature show is in Chicago, which features artists from 21 countries. So here's a really cute little wagon and it's got two custom-made little Maltese puppies. I make them out of artificial fur and wire and I hand make the eyes and they just turn out so cute. Many mini pets are made of clay. Bridget McCarty creates them with a kind of fur coat that makes them more realistic. She goes viral on social media with her miniature sets of sitcoms like Friends. You could shrink yourself down and go inside of one of your scenes. That's like the ultimate goal. But since we can't do that, we just have to look very closely and carefully. So is it escapism? Escapism, meditation, patience, and just a lot of joy and happiness in my opinion. Miniatures transport you through time and space. Much like a child imagining she's a princess living in a castle. This one comes from the imagination of a grown-up. But she knows a thing or two about playing pretend. Colleen Moore is a silent film star and in 1928, she hires a hundred Hollywood artists to create a dream home. In today's money, it costs her about 11 million dollars. She grew up with a passion for dollhouses and acting, of course. As she got older, she started putting together this dollhouse while she was still at the height of her acting career. During the depression, the castle tours the country to raise money for children's charities. Its permanent home is the Museum of Science and Industry. How we know it's for fairies. If you go and look at the Great Hall, there's this beautiful curved staircase. And often people wonder, well, why isn't there a rail there? Well, fairies have wings. They don't need a rail. Bula Saradakis is curator at the Museum of Science and Industry. One of our smallest, smallest objects, if you look right here, that dome, that little glass dome. And underneath it is the chairs of the papa bear, mama bear and baby bear. And those are so tiny that they sit on the heads of pins. That's how tiny those those chairs are. That's amazing. They really are amazing. Literally like going back in time and holding something and creating this little time capsule that kind of. Chris Toledo is more of a realist. He makes elegant rooms as a way of preserving history. So this piece, it's a reproduction of a 1926 kitchen. And, you know, for this piece, when it comes to, you know, a lot of my historically accurate pieces, I am very adamant about the details. Because I love so many different forms of art. Miniaturism is really the one medium that really contains all the mediums. You know, there's painting, there's woodworking, there's history involved. So I love everything to look like it's not just a pristine new piece. I love it to look like it's been lived in and has a little bit of a soul to it. And everything's functional. All the drawers open. Oh, really? Can you open a drawer for me? Yeah. Look at that. Lining everything. Oh, with the liner, sure. Hundreds of years ago, wealthy people commissioned miniature recreations of their own houses. It is never meant as a play thing for children. It was meant to be instructional for the young children of these merchants to learn what a properly appointed home looked like. What I particularly love about it, I mean, it's all fabric. Madeline Crispel is a museum curator. She shows us rooms on exhibit at the History Center in Lake Forest, Illinois. Artist Eugene Kopchak creates this from his imagination. This is a miniature recreation of Alexander the Great's siege tent from the siege of Halicarnassus in 333 BC. And what makes it unique is there's no real world existing example of this. These other rooms are from private collections. The artist, Narcissa Thorne. She traveled, she saw these historic homes, and so what she wanted to do was bring that history of design to the people of Chicago. She marries the heir to the Montgomery Ward department store, so she has access to artists. Many of the people who worked on the original Thorne miniature rooms were artists in their own right. We can't travel to 16th century England or 18th century America, but Narcissa Thorne brings those worlds to us through her detailed miniature rooms. But miniatures are more diverse than a century ago. Skeletons, appliances, human organs, a Harvey Korman t-shirt. Our most complex build is the guitar. Margie Kreiner is a musician who loves pop culture. That's my fantasy is to add sound to the work. It just hasn't happened yet. We want people to come in and look around and have a good time. Margie has a workshop in Chicago, the Itty Bitty Mini Mart, where she works with wood, clay, textiles, leather, plastic, really anything. Well, we all started small and we all started playing with miniatures in some form, whether it was like a race car or a doll or something like that. And also, I think it lends you an alternate perspective on something that's familiar to you. It's the first miniature I built. It was a gift from my dad for his birthday. I made him a little slot machine out of just things that were laying around the house. Much of this is rooted in her childhood. The jello mold from family barbecues, the reel-to-reel machine her uncle wouldn't let her touch. How about a popcorn butter dispenser or a Mr. Microphone, an FM radio? To see the details of that first boom box, I think it kind of elicits those memories and that warm feeling that you felt at that time. We wanted to bring back mall culture and allow people to reach in and go shopping at the mall again. So if they needed a cinnamon roll, they can reach right in and grab it. By shrinking the ordinary, it forces you to look more closely and perhaps see something in a whole new way. Through miniatures, some seek to escape the real world, others to better understand it. If you want to just see what's going on, go to Etsy and look up miniature objects and you will see the full panoply of what's possible. But it's extraordinary what's being done now. The craftsmanship is really amazing. The scaled-down version can make an overwhelming world seem a bit more manageable. A touchscreen bombards your senses from a world-wide web, while this art form sparks your imagination right at your fingertip.