Calling Home
- Zoe Penina Baker
- Graduate Fine Arts Department, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
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Student Creative Production Grant
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.