Calling Home
- Zoe Penina Baker
- Graduate Fine Arts Department, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
Zoe Penina Baker, painting study of Zoe’s Parents’ living room including miniatures from the folk art collection acrylic on canvas 18x24".
Calling Home will be a modular, moveable dollhouse and an accompanying interactive web-based digital dollhouse. Through it’s design, Calling Home will directly address current concerns around museum and art accessibility in the COVID-19 era and beyond, with a layered approach to the digital interface, which includes audio and a gameified tour component, transporting visitors inside the dollhouse. This project is part of an ongoing line of study rooted in researching stories around works in a collection of Jewish folk art paintings that once belonged to Zoe Penina Baker’s Savta (grandmother). Through this project, Zoe will act as a folk ethnographer of their own family and build a bridge between their practice and questions around post-Holocaust maximalism, Jewish histories of collecting, and miniatures as a tool for re-claiming memories. The physical dollhouse will be handmade and filled with miniature painted re-creations of work from the folk art collection and a combination of replica and imagined furniture and miscellany inspired by their family home and a conceived aspirational home.