The Huddled Masses — by Guest Mom Laurie Smithwick

(photo from pottery barn)

When I was growing up, the stairway at my parents' house was lined with pictures. Generations of photos, framed and fit together in a jigsaw family tree. The photos didn't change, but the collage was occasionally added to over the years. Crowds of cousins all grown up; wedding photos, first my brother's, then mine; and now portraits of my parents' grandchildren looking suspiciously like photos that are already hanging.

I'm going to jump on ahead and tell you that I believe my family's photo wall is directly responsible for my love of masses of pictures. I've been at it since I was a kid. It started with bulletin boards, layered photo essays of Laurie, age 9, age 14, age 18. In high school, my car's rear end was diapered in bumper stickers and the inside ceiling upholstery was a polka-dotted array of buttons. In college, it was posters, which I tended to assemble edge-to-edge, until the room was wallpapered, including the ceiling. Often the posters turned the corners of the room. In my first New York apartment, I translated my postcard collection into a ring around my room. In later homes, the postcards were grouped into themes and hung in clusters, hands on a door, pulp fiction in the kitchen, chinese flash cards in the office.

We have recently moved into a new house and my husband and I seem to have an unspoken agreement that we're starting from scratch here, which is exciting. All our old wall art is being scrutinized for relevance, interest and other unspoken criteria. In our dining area we have a very very big wall (about 15' wide by 10' high) that I was concerned about. Where would we find something so very large that I also liked? Enter Sister Mary Corita. I inherited from my parents a set of prints of a serigraph series of hers called "Damn Everything But The Circus," which is all the letters of the alphabet, plus the title, silkscreened on individual 11" squares with quotes, photos, vintage labels, collages arranged artfully. A quick trip to Michael's uncovered scrapbooking frames — 12" squares in black frames, with glass. I mounted the prints on black scrapbooking paper, framed them and turned the job over to my helpful husband and his handy dandy laser level.




I love it so much. Maybe more than anything I've ever hung on any of my walls. We were thrilled to have it up in time for our annual New Year's Day party and we got some very nice comments on it.

Another thing I'm excited about in our new house is my postcard rack. A friend sent it to us a few years ago as a "thanks for letting me stay at your house" gift, but then Zoe and Lucy were born and it stayed in the attic, unused, despite my now rather substantial postcard collection. This Christmas, we pulled it out to display our holiday cards. And the other day, I sat down with my postcards and swapped them out. It's a fun display since it really IS a postcard rack. And I've already established how I love the way lots of postcards look together.



And the best part? If you're sitting in the living room, you can see the postcards AND the alphabet wall.

Don't you just love the way lots of things look when they're all grouped together?