Francesca Hummler, All on her own, 2021 © the artist

This show centers around Francesca Hummler’s project Our Dollhouse, created in 2021 as part of over thirteen years of ongoing photographic collaborations with her family. It began as a way to make up for the absence of baby pictures in her younger sister’s life, before her adoption from Ethiopia into the artist’s German-American family, and has since evolved into a deeper exploration of belonging, racial identity, and generational memory.

In Our Dollhouse, Hummler’s sister engages with a puppenstube, originally built by great-grandparents and passed down through the family, with Hummler’s father completing its construction. Together the family furnished it using heirlooms, including a clock handmade by the great-grandmother. This shared process becomes symbolic, a gentle but powerful claim to the lineage she now belongs to.

The series reflects how photography can function as a form of photo-therapy, helping her sister gain confidence and navigate feelings of outsideness, especially within their white family and the broader racialized context we move through in the United States. The series stands as a visual love letter to Hummler’s sister, and to the idea that chosen, built, and shared family histories matter just as much as inherited ones.