Betye Saar has been accumulating ephemera — taxidermied animals, cages, computer parts, and more — throughout her life. Since the 1970s, she has crafted these found objects into assemblage artworks that often subvert racist artifacts and images, beginning with her famed sculpture “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” (1972). “I knew I could not avoid the pain, so it became part of my art,” she said in 1973, as quoted in the monograph Black Doll Blues.
Today, her studio is filled to the brim with objects and ephemera gathered from nature, on her international travels, and at flea markets. On one special shelf sits her cherished collection of Black dolls. Some of these dolls, which Saar calls a “family,” have traveled to New York City, where they are now on view through October 4 at the New York Historical alongside paintings, prints, and sculptures featuring figurines. Nearing the occasion of her upcoming 100th birthday, the exhibition celebrates Saar’s promised gift of her collection of over 100 dolls to the institution.
While the artist, over the years, has considered cleaning out her studio, “the dolls are the one thing she can't discard,” Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto, vice president and chief curator of the New York Historical and the exhibition’s co-curator, told Hyperallergic.
“It is very meaningful that she's entrusting us with these dolls,” added co-curator Rebecca Klassen.
Born in 1926, Saar never had a Black doll of her own to play with as a girl. She came across her first as a college student in 1949 — an Amosandra doll — and became enthralled by them. She began incorporating them into her art practice in the 1970s, and they have figured into her work ever since, appearing in assemblages like “Indigo Mercy” (1975) and the print “Aunt Jemima and Hoo Doo Doll” (1972).
"I began collecting Black dolls decades ago. Some are hand-made, others manufactured, some even represent derogatory racial stereotypes. They each have a history and I feel some even have an energy of their past life, of the little child who loved them,” Saar said in a statement to Hyperallergic.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the artist found comfort in these dolls and began pulling them down from the shelf and painting them into little scenes, using watercolors, a medium she had seldom explored over her long career.
“I took solace in painting them and imagining their mystical adventures,” Saar continued.
Dolls are ubiquitous playthings — among the oldest toys in history. Simultaneously a form of textile art and an integral form of play, they also became, over time, an example of learned racism and a way to reinforce negative stereotypes through caricature. Saar’s collection dates back to the 19th century, and includes many minstrel, mammy, golliwog, and “topsy-turvy” dolls, which sit alongside some of the earliest mass-produced Black dolls.
Saar’s reimagining offered these figurines a new context and a life separate from — or possibly in spite of — their original intentions, transforming their meaning, alchemizing negative imagery into something potent, something positive.
“She is really attracted to the energy behind the dolls and this idea that they've lived very rich past lives and that they have this almost embodied memory of an energetic charge within them,” said Klassen.
The exhibition at the New York Historical opens with the only doll made by Saar’s hand, in 1974, “Hoo Doo Woman,” informed by a Haitian doll from the mid-20th century in her collection that served as a rich source of inspiration from the 1970s until today.
In her watercolors and sculptures, Saar offers these dolls alternative lives beyond the parameters of their oft-derogatory origins. In her renderings of dolls drifting through celestial skies, Ikemoto explains that “there is a deeper cultural reference to the legend of the flying Africans who lift into the sky and fly away rather than submit to bondage.” In another watercolor, the doll has become “grounded, and he is self-possessed,” she adds.
“She views the act of collecting and gathering and putting things together as a sort of ritual practice,” Klassen said, “finding the energy within the object and then this ultimately transforming and then releasing the object onto the world.”
