Tiny Histories

This episode starts with the teeniest tiny object that Tiny Histories has ever covered: particles of dust. Art museum dust, to be exact. Back in the day, Sean Miller had a job cleaning dust from the art at the Seattle Art Museum. In true artist form, he worked with the medium he had at his disposal and followed it to see where it took him—in this case, into the strange but true history of a woman named Ann Hodges, up into space, and back down to Earth again, deeper into his own family history...

When composer Jeff Beal (House of Cards, Carnivale, Pollock) originally found the diary of his great grandmother Della, he and his wife Joan were bowled over by the story it told: a first-hand account of a woman who was widowed and raising six kids on a farm in the early 1900's. Something about the matter of fact way she wrote of what seemed like incredible suffering and the efficiency of her words stood out to Jeff and Joan. They thought they should do something with it musically. But they w...

When their family Gulf Coast vacation home was blown away by Hurricane Carla in 1961, Jennifer Vacca's grandpa had a great solution: He would move one of the buildings from the family business onto the now empty lot and they'd turn it into the new vacation house. And so, the Bayhouse was born. Six decades, multiple generations, and untold numbers of hurricanes later, it's still standing. And it's played a central role in the life of Jenny's family, and in her life in particular. Hear a story ...

It's time that I revealed my true identity: I am an agent for the Greater Seattle Bureau of Fearless Ideas. Oh--you're not familiar with the Bureau? Well that's okay, because you're about to learn all about them and the amazing work that they do in this BFI mega episode! It features seven stories, some of them from a Tiny Histories workshop with BFI students, and some of them from BFI's grownup leaders. You'll travel from Seattle to Thailand and Ethiopia and back again. You'll learn about rel...

During the 1960s, just after the Apollo 11 mission had taken Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the moon, a rogue group of artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, were hatching a plan. If they were successful, they'd smuggle an entire museum of contemporary art onto the moon. In this episode, Jade Dellinger, Director of the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida SouthWestern State College talks about how the idea for the Moon Museum started at Ma...

Moments of self discovery--those big "a-ha!" moments where we finally wrap our heads around some truth we've been bread-crumbing down the trail--often happen during challenging times, or when some new perspective is suddenly and unavoidably shoved in our face. But sometimes, we gain a new understanding of who we are because we see ourselves in someone else. And if we're really lucky, we get to experience these moments with friends and community. And if we're really, really lucky, we get to di...

Sometimes, the story is about the absence of a thing, or the loss of a thing. That's the story for over 500 million people all over the world--including people in the United States--when it comes to menstrual products. Not having access to this small thing causes people to lose days of school, to lose wages from their jobs; it robs them of their agency and often alters the course of their lives in major ways. Days for Girls is an organization that is working to change this situation by provid...

Even the tchotchkes on our desks have stories behind them. Especially if that desk happens to be in the art studio of Jack Massing, one half of the conceptual art duo, the Art Guys. Jack is a kind of connoisseur of found objects. And in this episode of Tiny Histories, he tells the story of one such found object that he's had for over forty years, how it helped form who he became as an artist, and how its meaning has changed for him over the course of his life.Read this great retrospective on ...

In the inaugural episode of the podcast, we go on a hunt for buried treasure inside of a suburban home, following clues left behind by the recently deceased. Dr. Kim Corson tells the tale of how she was sure that her dying father, with whom she'd had a difficult relationship, had given away a precious piece of jewelry. After he passed, she was shocked to find herself literally digging up treasure he'd left behind in his home, leading to a kind of unbelievable discovery. Find out more ab...

Hear what's coming up in the first season of Tiny Histories, a new podcast from Pillow Fort Studios about the big stories behind the small things in our lives.