Some of D.C.’s most creative art installations could be right under your nose, and you wouldn’t even know it. “They’re so, so small,” says Becky Nissel, describing tinyfellas, a project that she co-created with her friend Jason Campos.
For the past couple months, the duo has been placing tiny figurines—less than an inch tall—around the city and posting the scenes on Instagram for people to find and tag.
“We were so happy when we got 20 followers—and they were all our friends,” Nissel says about the passion project. Since then, they’ve received kudos from A Creative DC and DC Inno, and hooked more than 900 fans.
One of the first installations features a man painting from a popular overlook at Cardozo High School. Nissel, a visual artist and copywriter, painted his tiny canvass by hand. “She did such an amazing job,” says Campos, a creative lead and UX designer working in Virginia.
Campos and Nissel purchases the objects online from a company in Germany that designs them for use with model trains. He says he has enough figurines in his apartment to last for months of installations, and they have a goal of creating about one per week.
When grouping the objects, the creative process sometimes come from sheer instinct, including the case of two nuns and a woman pulling her shirt up. “These just have to go together,” Campos says he thought when they made up the scene.
Other times, they’ll lay the tiny objects on Campos’ counter and think about where in the city they would go best.
On the National Mall, there’s a police officer poking a man who’s laying on a bench. There’s another scene with a group of people in camping gear outside of the new REI store in NoMa.
The project’s Instagram page currently features nine scenes. Since they’re set up in places where Nissel and Campos frequent, they’re able to check on them from time to time. They’ve found that some of them remain glued down for weeks.
Sometimes though, they are gone quickly. Nissel recalls setting up an installation at Meridian Hill Park, and moments later, a little girl scooped up the objects. “I hope she still has them,” Nissel says, adding that she wanted to stop the girl at first but didn’t want to steal her happiness.
The project is just fun to do, she says, “whether people get to see them or not.”
