The Hauntings of the Thorne Rooms combines details of the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute in Chicago and the Knoxville Museum of Art with photos of real children forced out of their homes. Narcissa Thorne was a Chicago socialite who built miniature rooms with her family fortune, helped by the misery of the depression when hiring architects and artisans and going on shopping sprees all over impoverished Europe to educate America about good taste by showing off the riches of European aristocracy and American high society.

This is the glorious, whitewashed history that is being promoted around the world. The history of child labor, exploitation, removal and displacement is an inconvenient aspect that is rather not remembered or twisted into a system of benevolent patronage. In this project, the specters of real children as documented by Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Frances Benjamin Johnston or an anonymous Minnesotan are haunting the splendor of the past, wanting to be remembered and having their stories told.