Northlandia: How a roadside Fairyland led to a museum of doll dioramas

GRAND RAPIDS — Judy Garland was born here, but the Dorothy doll in a "Wizard of Oz" diorama at Story Art and Museum looks nothing like her.

"It's the story, instead of the MGM characters," explained Executive Director Heidi Wick. The museum's Dorothy, who's about the size of an American Girl doll, has details drawn from the 1900 L. Frank Baum book instead of the 1939 film adaptation.
"Dorothy has silver slippers," said Wick, "and she's got a kiss on her forehead from the good witch to protect her."

Artist Faith Wick, Heidi's mother, also made a set representing the movie characters, but those figures are currently in a private collection in Switzerland. "I'd love to have that set come back to Grand Rapids," said Heidi Wick.

Story Art and Museum occupies two former schoolrooms in the Old Central School. A second-story corner classroom, formerly home to the Judy Garland Museum, now contains dozens of doll dioramas. The tables and shelves that hold the displays form a twisting path through the tightly packed space.

Walking through, you'll see a grotesque emperor modeling his nonexistent "new clothes" from the Hans Christian Andersen story. You'll see Hansel and Gretel, so pleased with their sweets that they're untroubled by the lurking witch. You'll see Rumpelstiltskin, Pippi Longstocking, the Three Bears, Little Boy Blue, Peter Pan, multiple different versions of Alice and numerous Wonderland characters.

Also — don't be scared — clowns. "Today, clowns are in movies and dolls are in movies and people make them scary," said Heidi Wick. "That didn't exist in Faith's time."

Standing by a shelf of clowns, Wick pointed to figures based on specific characters. "Ruffles the Clown. He was a Ringling Brothers clown, and he's fantastic. This is Pom Pom the Clown. This one here is a clown with masks ... a thespian, they call him, a theater clown. And actually, if you look carefully, his face looks like Gerald Ford."

Yes, the post-Watergate president. "In 1976, I believe, Faith was a Minnesota Mother Artist of the Year," explained Heidi Wick, "and traveled with 50 other Mother Artists of the Year from every state and went to meet Gerald Ford at the White House. And so she made a doll (of) Gerald Ford. Afterwards, she made him into a clown."

Why a clown? "He had such antics!" said Heidi Wick. "He was known for falling over."

There's a lot to take in at Story Art and Museum, and like Alice's rabbit hole, the story of the collection just goes deeper and deeper the further you get into it.

The story centers on Faith Wick, who made all the figures on display, along with many more held in collections around the world. She's now 92 years old and living in Cohasset. During a brief phone interview with the News Tribune, Faith Wick said about her body of work that she was "happy to have it there" in the museum run by her daughter.

At first glance, the collection may seem a small-town oddity, but at Faith Wick's peak, her work was a hot commodity. Posters hanging in the museum bear witness to her onetime celebrity among collectors. "Meet Faith Wick," reads an event advertisement bearing the Neiman-Marcus logo, "and see her magnificent collectible dolls featuring Alice in Wonderland, Mad Hatter and White Rabbit."

A 1986 book, "Faith Wick: Doll Maker Extraordinaire," chronicled the vast range of collectible dolls created by the artist. In the early '80s, limited-edition dolls by Faith's company, Wicket Originals, retailed for $300-$1,500 each, the equivalent of about $1,000-$5,000 today. Faith Wick traveled around the country promoting her wares, which she manufactured using a network of dozens of craftspeople working in their own shops.

When the artist arrived in a city where her dolls were being sold, wrote "Doll Maker Extraordinaire" author Helen Bullard, "the usual routine was a press party, followed by a special cocktail party for dignitaries. Then during the next two days would come the sales and autograph signing by Faith. She soon discovered that when she appeared in special costumes to create an effect, the sales were better."

While Faith Wick's creations have included founding fathers (an advertisement for that doll series showed Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton in close conference), musicians (Scott Joplin, for one), artists (Grandma Moses, paintbrush in hand) and even an iron ore miner (like her husband, Mel), fairytales and classic stories were especially close to her heart.

Faith Fuller was born in Buhl. Her Finnish immigrant grandmother taught her how to sew, make patterns and dress dolls. The young woman studied education and became a kindergarten teacher, inviting her students' parents to a shower celebrating a new doll for the class. "The doll received many lovely gifts," read a newspaper report.

By 1960, Faith was married to Mel Wick, and the couple had four children. That year, they purchased a roadside attraction known as Fairyland Park in Marble, Minnesota. The creation of an enterprising woman named Myrtle M. Gustafson, Fairyland was a walk-through collection of over three dozen scenes from fairytales and history.

Faith Wick altered a sign that had previously advertised Fairyland as a collection of "oddities, freaks and antiques." She took her stories seriously, and set to work renovating the park. By the mid-1960s, several thousand visitors each summer were paying 50 cents each to gape at Mother Hubbard's giant shoe, "Three Porkies" (with a wolf hiding in the woods) and of course, a "Wizard of Oz" quartet.

The Wicks sold the anachronistic attraction in 1972. (Later owners removed the displays, and Heidi Wick doesn't believe any original Fairyland figures still exist.) The experience of running the park had energized Faith Wick — the figures she built or improved in her Fairyland workshop included a witch with glowing eyes, voiced by the artist herself with a little technological assist.

After selling the park and moving to Grand Rapids, "Faith started making the figures that were life-size (at Fairyland), smaller," said Heidi Wick. "And that started this new business. She was 45 years old when she started making dolls and traveling around the country."

At first, Heidi Wick explained, her mother used "the same process that was left to her from Myrtle Gustafson. It was a plasticine kind of clay, and then there would be a rubber mold made, and then a plaster head poured."

By the time Faith Wick turned to dolls in the 1970s, she had the benefit of polymer clay that, when baked, was much more durable. Molds from the original sculptures could be used to make porcelain or resin products such as doll heads, with embedded wire armatures to support the dolls' soft bodies.

"Doll making was the most fascinating thing I had ever done," Faith Wick told Bullard. "It combined all the things I love to do: research, organization, creating, sculpting, costuming and painting, and later, organizing my own production operation and hitting the road to sell the dolls."

Faith Wick's timing was propitious. An international market for handmade collectible dolls grew in the 1970s and '80s as nostalgic buyers sought display items with more character than the mass-market plastic dolls that had flooded stores in the postwar years.

The collectible doll boom laid the foundation for the phenomenal success of the American Girl brand (which Faith Wick loved, and collected), launched by Wisconsin's Pleasant Rowland in 1986. Dolls such as Faith's were enjoyed by children, but weren't affordable as ordinary playthings. In 1982, one buyer paid $100,000 for a complete collection of Wicket Originals.

The Wicks eventually moved to Florida, where they commissioned the first sets to display Faith's dolls in dioramas. Faith Wick's initial doll displays went up in a Florida gift shop, then moved with the couple to Ohio. Finally, in 2005, the displays were installed at the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids — just one day after Garland's ruby slippers were stolen.

"What would Judy say?" Faith Wick said to a TV news reporter covering the story. "I don't think she'd like it."

When the museum needed more children's play space in 2021, the dolls were returned to the Wicks. By that point, Heidi Wick and her husband were living in Grand Rapids, and Faith's daughter had a vision. She would combine the dolls from the Judy Garland Museum with figures from the family's personal collection and create a nonprofit organization in a space that would serve to both display the dioramas and host community events.

"We have music concerts, we have a Lego build, we've had (decorating) with candy, and just events where people can come in and share their stories," said Heidi Wick. "Our meeting space, we added in November." Groups including Al-Anon and Alcoholics Anonymous meet at Story Art and Museum "and feel very welcome. They love our space."

Heidi Wick, a musician and teacher who plays with groups including, on French horn, the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra, learned multitasking from her mother. Faith Wick's own career as an educator continued while she ran Fairyland and launched her doll business.

"I grew up at Fairyland," said Heidi Wick. "My name is Heidi. My mom is currently 92, and we've been sharing the story 'Heidi.' I'm so much like Heidi (the character): I just want to share and heal. ... There's so much in the story that we can use to travel here, travel there, share our pain."

Gesturing at the roomful of doll dioramas, Heidi Wick said, "You might ask, what motivated Faith to create this? Well, this is 5% of what she did. This is just a drop in the bucket. She did it because it was a healing for herself as well."

Heidi Wick shared an audio recording of her mother from 2021, when Faith Wick visited an earlier incarnation of the Story Art and Museum in a Grand Rapids retail space. In the recording, Faith said it was "amazing" to see such a large collection of her dolls displayed together.

"Isn't that crazy that I don't remember making them?" she said. "But they looked so familiar that I thought, 'I could do that. I could do that!' And I didn't realize, I did do it."