Personals: Tin Man Seeks Compatible Girl. Must Galvanize My Interest. Send Inquiries and Metal Samples to Tiny Tin. Tiny Tin and Marla. A love story made in . . . well, yes, a sheet metal shop. Read on for the scrappy details and pointed facts. Happy Valentine's Day!
After a lifetime creating ductwork for heating and air conditioning systems, roofing, gutters, and "anything else that could be made from metal," Irving Dominick began to create the objects he calls his "art." Marla, with her permanent wave hairstyle, eye-catching lashes, and snappy shoes, is the best surviving example of the whimsy and care that inspired his metal figures.
Dominick began working in the sheet metal trade with his father after school and on Saturdays when he was fourteen, and soon thereafter entered into a formal apprenticeship with a firm in Brooklyn. As an advertising attraction, his father crowned the roof of his shop in the Bronx with a larger-than-life figure called "Tiny Tin," a self-portrait by the shop foreman. After his father's death, Dominick and his brother moved the family business and its mascot, "Tiny Tin," to Spring Valley, a suburb of New York. Dominick, pleased to have a reason to create nonfunctional, imaginative forms, made two replacement "Tiny Tin" figures after collectors bought previous versions. A collector who owned one figure asked Dominick to produce a female companion for "Tiny Tin." Dominick used his ten-year-old granddaughter, Marla, as his model.
Pictured top: Tiny Tin with his true love, Marla. Photograph courtesy of American Primitive Gallery, New York, New York.
Source: Lynda Roscoe Hartigan. Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C. and London: For the National Museum of American Art by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).
Pictured bottom: Irving Dominick (1916–1997), Marla,1982, cut, bent, soldered, and riveted galvanized iron, 59 x 35 1/4 x 14 3/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr..