BRATTLEBORO-If you miss Brattleboro’s Festival of Miniatures that garnered lots of well-deserved attention, The Museum of Things Tiny & Found (MTTF), one feature of the holiday event, is now nestled permanently in the lobby of the Hooker-Dunham Theater and Gallery.
The museum will open for sneak peeks this weekend, starting at Gallery Walk from 3 to 7 p.m. on Friday, April 3, with a tour at 6 p.m. Free champagne and miniature hors d’oeuvres will be served,and miniature cocktails will be available for purchase.
The MTTF will open again from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday, April 4, and Sunday, April 5 (Easter), with a tour at 3 p.m. on both days.
More than 1,200 people saw the museum’s pop-up exhibit at the Latchis Gallery during the Festival of Miniatures.
The Commons spoke recently with Dory Hamm, MTTF’s creative engine, who says the museum will become “a sanctuary for all things miniature with the works/collections from at least 20 artists, as well as a makers’ gift shop for consignment.”
Hamm says that he and MTTF’s curatorial manager, Tabitha Celani “dream of makers’ workshops, a start/stop animation film festival, and more.” Celani describes themself as “co-curator/co-proprietor/co-founder, so to speak.”
The museum’s website attributes the founding to a third staff member, one “Baron Joelseph Pumpernickel Kleinhamm,” who purportedly brings to the table advanced degrees in “Snackology, Zoomology, Playology, Snuggleomics, and Curation” at his young age of 11 years.
In a news release, the curators describe MTTF as “a museum of things, yes indeed, tiny and found.”
Hamm stresses the value of both “found” and “tiny.”
He says the museum hopes to cover “a wide range of tiny things” found everywhere “from antique shops to attics to sea beds,” including, but not limited to “dollhouses, dioramas, trains, planes, automobiles, thimbles, buttons, seashells, acorns, tchotchkes, trinkets, toys, tools, beads, portraits, jewelry, other nature items, and miniatures by the hundreds.”
Celani expands on the “found,” too.
“‘Found,’ meaning literally found on the street or found two objects that went together and made a cute little pot,” they say, adding that MTTF treasures the artistry and “just the weird little freaky miracles of nature and what they produce on such a small scale.”
‘Incredibly serendipitous’
Enthusiasm for the miniatures museum at the Latchis exceeded expectations, so “we started to talk and dream about what next,” Hamm said. “It seemed donors were willing to help create a miniature museum as a kind of holding place for the Festival of Miniatures throughout the year.”
The establishment of the MTTF “came about through [Hamm’s] collaboration first with Vermont Suitcase Company (VSC),” with which Hamm is a player.
Shannon Ward, who runs the Hooker-Dunham and is also in the VSC, “had the theater space that was needing more energy while VSC needed storage and a rehearsal space,” Hamm says. “So that was just a natural partnership.”
Hamm was also drawn to the underutilized gallery space, and was inspired by its “weird, curved walls and nooks,” which can create challenges for some artists.
“All of a sudden, you start to fill those curved walls and nooks with miniature things,” and it felt “like little underground, magical, miniature way,” he says. “It just was a dream to dream to dream.”
For Celani, “this whole museum project has felt incredibly serendipitous,” they say. “It’s all just really falling into place.”
A visual artist working out of a downtown studio — a “gorgeous little room in this 1920s-ish building with tin ceilings” and a window that looks out on trees — “my miniature work [including jewelry] is sort of a cobbling together of things I’ve made by hand myself or existing objects that are in miniature repurposed,” they say.
They explain that “the rich sense of depth and scene and environment you can get from really lovingly made miniatures” is “a huge tenet of the museum itself.”
Pointing out the four wings of the museum, Hamm enumerates six filled printers’ trays, both from the MTTF permanent collection and on loan, as well as dollhouses, dioramas, and a rotating gallery in “a tiny hallway off the main gallery.”
“And we’ll be getting the Mouse Metro,” he said of the miniature subway system, populated with anthropomorphized mice, that was crafted by Jonny Wolfman and Wendy Windle of Brattleboro. That effort was named “Champion (Maker Award),” the festival’s top honor.
For railroad enthusiasts, the model trains that ran in Beadniks will now chug along a raised track, thanks to owner Brian Robertshaw.
There will be a sensory area, too, Celani adds: an interactive space inviting visitors to draw mini self-portraits and to physically interact with “a bunch of objects that can be touched, held, and viewed up close” with magnifying glasses.
“I’ve always been obsessed with miniature things,” says Hamm, and he’s been collecting them his whole life. “Now I just enjoy the curation — the putting of everything perfectly into little print trays and making it all look beautiful.”
A theater person at the core, he adds, “as a kid, I would spend hours and hours setting up scenes — just building the world. And then we’d play with it for 20 minutes.”
“It’s always about the curating and building of a world,” he says. “And telling a story in that miniature world.”
Of the workshops in the offing, Hamm says he’ll start the run with “how to curate your own print press tray.”
“We have the advantage of living in an old book press town where there’re actually a fair number of print press trays kicking around,” he says of the antique wooden flat drawers that once held metal type used in letterpress printing in the heyday of Brattleboro’s book printing and manufacturing industrial era. “We’re going to be selling some of those in the museum gift shop.”
A museum-themed Festival of Miniatures in December
Hamm praises Festival of Miniatures founder Melany Kahn.
“This all really wouldn’t exist without her […] dreaming and encouraging. She’s been such an incredible force in making all this happen,” he says, noting that Kahn showed up to help paint MTTF gallery walls recently. “She’s very empowering. And so dedicated to Brattleboro and to downtown revitalization.”
For its quirky and esoteric nature and the prospect of discovering yet another gem in town, it’s Hamm’s hope — shared by Kahn — that the museum will find a place on Atlas Obscura (atlasobscura.com), a website that describes itself as devoted to stories of “the world’s most wondrous places and foods,” “because Brattleboro will be home to one of the only back-alley miniature museums in the world.”
As Kahn speaks with The Commons, she shares a new acquisition: an architecturally accurate miniature of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s garden floor, pointing out materials and features that might well have made the museum’s architect, Willard T. Sears, quite proud.
The Festival will have a museum theme in its second year in 2026, she says, with the Brattleboro Museum & Arts Center acting as fiscal sponsor.
Explaining the rationale, she adds, “museums help to promote and create community and connectivity,” and Brattleboro has even more to offer in that realm with Beadniks’ bead museum, among others now in the area and in the works.
Moreover, Kahn adds, school spirit houses — miniature house models that are distributed to schools for classes to decorate collectively — will return in December, when 14 area schools will be invited to create a museum out of the spirit house each will be given.
“It could be a dinosaur museum, a plant museum, art museum, whatever they want it to be,” she says.
Threading the museum theme throughout the festival, Kahn adds “it feels absolutely perfect for Brattleboro.”
‘Those can’t stay in this apartment’
Kahn describes Hamm and Celani as “the heartbeat of the Museum of Things Tiny & Found.”
She knew Hamm through New England Youth Theatre and, through the grapevine, heard of the “eccentric collections” housed in the apartment Hamm shares with Sandy Klein, who directs the NEYT costume department.
“They’re unbelievably creative. So I saw his printer display on the wall and I said, ‘Dory, those can’t stay in this apartment,’” Kahn recalls. “‘People need to see them for the festival.’”
Kahn connected Hamm with Jon Potter, executive director of Latchis Arts and the Latchis Theatre, and the ball started rolling. MTTF opened with the festival last Dec. 1.
The new MTTF will be open to all. A first phase to provide access for those with mobility issues — long a limitation of the space, which is one floor below street level — is in the works.
The first phase of this access — an electronic stair chair given to MTTF — “will hopefully be installed sometime this spring/summer,” the news release says.
“We also plan on offering a free digital tour on our website for all to appreciate from near or far,” the release adds. MTTF also envisions events and maker workshops.
For those interested in exhibiting miniatures or offering a donation of “tinies, miniatures, dollhouses, or antiques,” contact Hamm and Celani at museumoftiny@gmail.com.
After the soft opening this weekend, MTTF will officially open In the Hooker-Dunham Theater and Gallery, 139 Main St. #407, Friday, May 1, 3 to 7 p.m. for Gallery Walk, and then will open every weekend from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and weekdays by appointment. Follow the alleyway between Marigold and Gallery in the Woods, and down those stairs.
Admission during posted hours is on a “pay-what-you-can” basis: A donation of $5 to $10 is suggested, but folks are welcome in for free. Private tours can be booked online for a sliding scale of $10 per person.
For more information and to book tours, visit museumoftiny.com. See more photos at instagram.com/museumofthingstinyandfound/.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.