Meridian native's love of all things miniature

Feb. 2—Small in size, but artist Lee Harper's miniature models are garnering a big reaction as they transport viewers into the world of some of Mississippi's most beloved landmarks.

From the Queen City's historic Threefoot Hotel to Jackson's Mayflower Cafe to Walter Anderson's Oldfields home in Gautier, Harper's passion for history and meticulous eye for detail in her small dioramas are earning the Meridian native a lot of attention.

"I am doing my dream job, I really am," the miniaturist said in a phone interview from her home in Oxford. "I do not know what else could make me more happy than what I am doing now.

"Because with the models, I get to paint, sculpt, whittle, engineer," Harper said. "I am laying roof and tile and brick, I am making corrugated tin siding. It is everything in my wheelhouse."

Harper recently completed work on a diorama of blues musician David "Junior" Kimbrough's juke joint, called Junior's Place, which was located in Chulahoma near Holly Springs in the north Mississippi hill country.

Last year, Blues photographer Bill Steber commissioned Harper to recreate the legendary club based on photographs he had taken of Junior's Place between 1993 and 1999, when it was bustling with energy and filled with crowds. The juke joint attracted countless musicians from around the world who traveled down a little Mississippi dirt road just for a chance to play with Kimbrough back in the '90s.

"Bill said it was one of the most special places, one of the most magical places he had ever been when Junior was playing there," Harper said.

The juke joint burned to the ground in 2000, so she had to use Steber's photographs to create the miniature model in meticulous detail from the billiard balls and pool cue sticks atop the pool table to a tiny ashtray of cigarettes to a worn and tattered sofa to scattered Busch Light and Budweiser beer cans to hand-written signs on the front door to a small Peavey amplifier sitting atop a table.

"The outside just looks like a barn. The inside is just wild, spectacularly wild," she said. "It was a barn and then a store and then a church and then a juke joint."

Harper said the project was really fun to make, taking her about five months to build Junior's Place and handcraft all of the tiny items inside and out.

"Without those photos, there is no way that piece could have been made," she said.

On Thursday, Feb. 15, beginning at 5:30 p.m., Harper and Steber will present an illustrated talk featuring her Junior's Place miniature scale model at the Mississippi Arts + Entertainment Experience as part of the new "America at the Crossroads: The Guitar and a Changing Nation" exhibit.

The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place in the museum's exhibit halls. Registration is available on The MAX website at msarts.org under the events tab.

Harper said the talk will be informal where they will give a little history of Junior's Place, show some photos so visitors can get a feel of the iconic juke joint and relate how she went about recreating the club in miniature detail.

Always artistic, Harper loved drawing, painting and making things as a little girl growing up in Meridian. Her parents, Terry and Trisha Collier, still reside in Lauderdale County, where she graduated from Meridian High School in 1988.

She went on to major in art, also branching out into English and philosophy classes, at the University of Southern Mississippi, where she earned her bachelor of arts degree in 1992.

She got into creating miniatures by chance several years ago when the arts association in Oxford had an ornament auction fundraiser one Christmas. Harper felt inspired to create a scale replica of the Hoka, an old movie theater and cafe that was a frequent hangout for generations of Ole Miss students.

"The Hoka hasn't been around for years and years and, I thought, I should make that because the cooler your piece is for the Christmas auction, the more money it raises for the arts association," she said.

Her miniature model of the Hoka was a hit.

"It opened up an entirely new world, and I haven't stopped getting commissions since then," Harper said.

She ended up doing several dioramas of Oxford landmarks, most of them no longer in existence. Photographs of her work were compiled into a book called "Tiny Oxford Gift Book."

Since then, she has created miniature models of other famous landmarks around the state.

Being from Meridian, she built tiny replicas of several well-remembered landmarks, including the Threefoot Hotel, Weidmann's Restaurant with its original exterior, the Red Hot Truck Stop sign, the Union Hotel, the Temple Theatre, the old Nelva Court Restaurant, the gypsy queen grave, and the now-demolished Virginia Court Motel with its neon diving lady sign built circa 1950.

"Everybody knew it as the diving lady motel because there was a famous neon sign of a lady diving...It was so cool and it had something flashing, but she was diving head first. I remember it as a teenager," she said of the motel once located on Tom Bailey Drive.

The Threefoot Hotel, she said, has probably been the most technically challenging of her projects because of all of the windows, which she meticulously cut out individually by hand.

"It is not four simple walls. There are all of these alcoves. There is probably 12 to 14 different surfaces and all of those windows need to line up," she said. "It took probably eight weeks ... It was the most technically challenging project I have done."

One of her favorite projects was completed last year and was a scale model of Oldfields, Walter Anderson's home in Gautier during the 1940s. The miniature is now on display at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs.

"It was the job of a lifetime. It was so incredible," said Harper, who put in countless hours researching the artist and his family's lives back then, as well as the time period, so she could be authentic with the replica.

"They wanted me to recreate his home from the 1940s and his attic space, which is where most of the popular pieces that we see out in public and online and on products were made in a six-year period of time," she said.

Oldfields is still standing, but heavily damaged over the decades, so she was not able to visit inside to get a firsthand look of the interior.

"There are no photos of the interior except for two or three in black and white of the attic and they were not art of him, but they were of the space. So I had to figure out what was in the rest of this house," Harper said. "This is my favorite kind of project. I got to do all of this research, read journals, diaries, watch documentaries, and then, this blew my mind, I got to interview Walter Anderson's children and mine their memories as to what they remembered in each room of the house.

"What they couldn't remember, I looked up and researched for authentic time period furnishings," she said.

Because every single item in the interior was extensively researched, Harper spent close to six months working on the project, which was unveiled at the Walter Anderson museum last June.

Harper said she is glad she has finally found a way to meld her love of art with her interest in history and her fondness for regional folklore and landmarks.

"Miniatures just to do little things are fun, but I'm not really interested in that per se. I am interested in them being another vehicle to tell a story," she said. "I'd love for (my work) to be remembered as a little bit of historic preservation because a lot of the places are not around anymore. Little pieces to help you spark your memories, either good or bad of a place. I hope my work helps tell some Mississippi stories."

Contact Glenda Sanders at gsanders@themeridianstar.com.