Review of the First Person Museum

First Person Museum. First Person Arts. Seth C. Bruggeman, Julia Foulkes, and Tom Sugrue, historical consultants; Katthleen McLean and Elizabeth Tinker, museum consultants; Dana Dorman, museum coordinator. Painted Bride Art Center (Philadelphia, Pa.), November 5-December 18, 2010.

The First Person Museum touts itself as “a museum of the people.” Exhibiting sixteen “ordinary” objects—from a wedding ring and a tie-dyed t-shirt, to a fishing license and a passport—alongside “the personal and societal stories that give them their worth,” the First Person Museum seeks to uncover “the worth of our homes, our things, and our stories,” as one of the large exhibit texts declares. Judging by the publicity material and the captions contextualizing the exhibit itself, museum coordinators want visitors to recognize that our stuff and the memories it engenders do not simply reveal our values, but society’s values as well.

     This attempt to link individual objects and their stories to broader concerns within the body politic seems like a gallant endeavor, and certainly one akin to “doing history,” which I would define as “the situating of a particular circumstance from the past within a social, cultural, political, and/or economic context through careful and responsible scholarly inquiry.” But the First Person Museum is not strictly a history museum, a fact made patently obvious by a quick glance at its five exhibit goals:

• Visitors will recognize that they endow objects with value.
• Visitors will understand that the person and his/her story is the focus.
• Visitors will be able to articulate an emotional response to the stories in the exhibit. 
• Visitors will understand that the meaning of an object is influenced by time, place and experience.
• Visitors will think about their own stuff differently.

None of the exhibit goals expressly identifies the acquisition of historical knowledge as a hoped-for result of museum patronage; none of the goals explicitly anticipate the exhibit leading visitors to a better understanding of the social and cultural influences that give “meaning” to our “stuff.” How, then, does history figure into the First Person Museum?

First Person Museum Captions, Revised

Here is the final version of the caption that will accompany Iris's black dolls, objects to be exhibited at the First Person Museum.


About Representation

Early mass-produced black dolls introduced or reinforced negative racial stereotypes, like the “mammy.” Later, when companies sold black dolls as darkly painted versions of their white counterparts, blacks handmade dolls because toy companies did not produce figures with ethnically correct features. Today, hand-made black dolls are highly sought by collectors.

First Person Museum Exhibit Captions

Based on personal research and written in preparation for the opening of the First Person Museum later this fall, the following exhibit captions attempt to chronicle various aspects of the history of Iris's black dolls.

About Hand-Made Dolls

The earliest hand-made black dolls were crafted by slaves and poor blacks, who could not afford the pricy porcelain figures imported from Europe. Later, blacks hand-made dolls because toy companies did not produce figures with ethnically correct features. Today, hand-made black dolls are highly sought by collectors.

Written by Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas

About Representation

Early black dolls introduced or reinforced negative racial stereotypes, like the mammy and the pickaninny. Later, companies mass-produced black dolls as darkly painted versions of their white counterparts. In the 1960s, African American-run companies began to manufacture dolls with ethnically correct features, some based on popular black celebrities.

Written by Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas

About Ownership

Black dolls came to the United States as the playthings of slave children. Later, as companies began to manufacture such toys, white children employed black dolls as servants for their white figurines. The emergence of recreational black doll collecting has resulted in museums, publications, and conventions dedicated to the subject.

Written by Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas

First Person Museum Exhibit Design

Assignment: How would you design the First Person Museum? Read Alice Parman's "Exhibit Makeovers: Do-It-Yourself Exhibit Planning" and describe your plan according to her six steps. Be sure to include a blueprint.

Step #1: Mission Statement, Take-Home Messages, and Storyline

Mission Statement (adapted from the First Person Arts website): "Everyone -- and everything -- has a story to tell. Sharing our stories and the stories of our possessions connects us with each other and the world."

Take-Home Messages:
(a) The story: Every object -- no matter how small or seemingly insignificant -- has two stories to tell: a personal story, and a history.
(b) The museum: The First Person Museum celebrates everyday objects, both for their individual (person) value and the value they possess within the larger (historical, cultural, social) context.
(c) The visitor: People like me play an essential role in museums like this.

The Storyline: Every object tells a story and a history. These stories and histories connect objects -- and their owners -- across time and place, and across racial/ethnic, gender, and age lines.

Step #2: "Galleries of Thought"

Unlike more conventional museums, which often display like objects with some sort of shared category, recognizable chronology, or collective theme, the objects in the First Person Museum relate to each other only insofar as they all have a story and history to tell. For this reason, creating a "gallery of thought" as Craig Kerger and Parman describe such arrangements becomes untenable. However, to show that all stories are valuable (in keeping with my take-home message), I have arranged the gallery into a semicircle; hopefully, visitors will recognize that while each story/history is different, all have value.

Step #3: Inventory & Facts

The sixteen objects that will feature in the First Person Museum have already been selected by a group organized by First Person Arts, and the "facts" relevant to each object have been presented by the owners of the objects (the storytellers) and the students in Studies in American Material Culture (the historians).

Steps #4 & #5: Motivate & Engage Visitors, Create the Look & Feel

Each person visiting the First Person Museum brings a unique set of experiences and perspectives to bear upon the objects in the museum and their arrangement within the space. The task for the curator, then, is to create the museum in such a way that visitors can move beyond those initial conceptions to arrive at the take-home messages of the museum and each object in it.

To that end, my design for the First Person Museum would attempt to strip away all superfluous context from the objects, allowing them to exist in and of themselves. Since Parman suggests cultivating within the exhibit space a "distinct visual style that communicates key messages about the content," I want to choose a design style that communicates the immanence of the objects first, and then augments that focus on materiality with story and history. The following description and blueprint (Step #6) attempts to cultivate such a space.

Housed in a display case of appropriate size, each object would present itself as unfettered as possible. With low lighting throughout the exhibit space and focused lighting (spotlighting) drawing attention to each piece, I would hope to further centralize each object and bring the focus of the visitor to bear upon the very materiality of the object (rather than on the physical surroundings of the object).

I recognize that this approach does contextualize the object in a certain way -- as a piece in a museum display -- and that people will necessarily bring attendant preconceptions and biases to such displays. I hope to combat these "bring-ins" by situating each object (literally) between video and audio presentations of its story and history. Visitors would wear headphones to experience each presentation.

Step #6: Blueprint

My basic design for the First Person Museum. Seating area in center,
individual display "cases" (pretend that the tables are cases, since Floorplanner
didn't have a "display case" option) in ring around room.

Closeup of one object area. Again, pretend that the table is in fact
a display case and note the two screens -- one to display a video
presentation of the object story, and another to display a video
presentation of the object history.

Images designed using Floorplanner.

Social/Cultural Context: Black Dolls

Assignment: How has your object or objects like it figured in popular culture? Has it appeared in political discourse, literature, film, television, or other visual arts? How does its role in popular culture vary with audience? What different meanings does it convey in different cultural contexts?

As I wrote yesterday, Iris's black dolls are homemade productions that have (presumably) not moved far beyond the context in which Iris (as the producer and owner) conceived them. This fact complicates my ability to complete the above assignment in its original form.

Even if I were to expand beyond Iris's dolls to a more generic examination of the social and cultural context of all black dolls, another problem crops up: black dolls have not been widely represented in most popular culture outlets. Such anonymity reflects the larger absence of black dolls in the consumer marketplace.

In attempting to move beyond these conceptual dilemmas, I have decided to focus this study on how popular cultural conceptions of blacks are reflected in (some of) the dolls of that era. After all, as the publicity blurb for SUNY Rockland's 2008 exhibit "Black Dolls: From Mammy to Barbie" suggests, the evolution of the portrayal of African Americans in popular culture can be seen quite clearly in mass-produced dolls.

Early dolls introduced or reinforced negative stereotypes about blacks. "Pickaninny" dolls emerged in the late decades of the 1800s, reflecting a stereotypical image of black children "as nameless, shiftless natural buffoons running from alligators toward fried chicken." The first famous pickaninny figure was Topsy, a character from Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852); though meant in Stowe's narrative to show how slavery "indelibly corrupted" children, the character was later placed in comic contexts "to trivialize slavery's brutality." Thomas Edison's 1904 film Ten Picaninnies "referred to [black children] as inky kids, smoky kids, black lambs, snowballs, chubby ebonies, bad chillun, and coons."

Image of a Golliwog doll, a representation of blacks
made popular in the 1890s. (WikiCommons)

Golliwog, another early anti-black caricature, came into the cultural consciousness of pre- and post-Civil War America by means of minstrel shows. Golliwog dolls, byproducts of these shows, existed as late as 1870s. Florence Kate Upton, a British novelist inspired by a black minstrel doll she'd played with as a child, wrote an 1893 book that re-popularized these dolls. The fact that both black and white children played with early iterations of these dolls helps to explain why a debate about the Golliwog as "a lovable icon or a racist symbol" has existed in Europe and the U.S. for the last four decades.

Another stereotypical image -- the mammy -- became so ubiquitous as to merit its own representation in doll form. The mammy caricature stereotyped black women as "obese, course, maternal figure[s]," and persisted throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Evidence suggests that both white and black children owned "mammy" dolls; while whites are most often remembered as using the dolls as servants for their white dolls¹, little evidence remains as to the use and meaning of mammy toys for black girls.²

With the rise of popular radio in the early years of the twentieth century, and continuing with the rise of television in the 1950s and 1960s, black dolls came to resemble characters from media productions. Among these representations was Amosandra, a doll based on the child of Amos and Ruby Jones, characters on the popular radio/TV program Amos 'n Andy. Despite controversy surrounding the show, contemporary writers perceive that Amosandra was "[p]robably the most well received [black] doll of [the] postwar period" among both whites and blacks. A doll based on baseball legend Jackie Robinson also became popular with both black and white consumers.³

With the dawn of the black doll industry in the 1960s and 1970s U.S. alongside the increased visibility of black celebrities in American popular culture, a trend toward black character dolls emerged. Black G.I. Joe figurines for boys appeared as late as 1964⁵; representations of actresses like Diahann Carroll and musicians like Dianna Ross also emerged in this era.⁶ Into the 1980s and 1990s, popular TV characters -- from The A-Team's Mr. T to Family Matters' Steve Urkel to Moesha's Moesha Mitchell -- were also presented in doll form, highlighting the continued prominence of black actors and actresses in American mass media.

Notes:
1. See Plate 39 in Myla Perkins, Black Dolls 1820-1991: An Identification and Value Guide (Paducah, Ky.: Collector Books, 1993), p. 26, for evidence of this use.
2. Dawn E. Reno, The Encyclopedia of Black Collectibles: A Value and Identification Guide (Radnor, Pa.: Wallace-Homestead Book Co., 1996), p. 103, conjures that, for pre-Civil War black children, "[p]erhaps mammy herself made the doll" -- an indication (though perhaps an unreliable one) that black children played with toys modeled in this way.
3. Perkins, p. 80.
4. "Modern Designs for Negro Dolls," Ebony, January 1952, p. 46, quoted in Perkins, p. 80.
5. Perkins, p. 151.
6. Reno, p. 106.

Revealing Iris' Dolls

Iris's dolls. Photo courtesy of David Kessler.

Thanks to Dana Dorman of First Person Arts, I recently had my first opportunity to view Iris's dolls, the objects I am researching in preparation for the opening of the First Person Museum this November.

The photograph above shows a number of Iris's dolls, two of which will appear in the museum exhibit. According to a report from Dana, Iris makes these dolls herself. As I have discovered in my research, homemade black dolls have a long heritage in the U.S.

I posted this picture (with permission from First Person Arts) because I thought readers of this blog might be interested in learning more about Iris's dolls specifically, even as they read more general research about the historical, social, and cultural context of black dolls.

Historical Context: Black Dolls

In her book on black dolls, writer Myla Perkins claims that "black dolls have been used as far back as one can practically go in our African history."¹ This study concerns itself with black dolls used as children's toys, particularly in an American context. Such black dolls came to the United States in the early colonial era as the playthings of slave children. As Buster writes, many dolls of this kind "have the humblest of origins, fashioned by the hands of anonymous black seamstresses, craftsmen, and other plain folk who simply liked to make things." ² Such dolls -- called "folk dolls" to distinguish them from their mass-produced counterparts -- were often (at least in the colonial and pre-Civil War U.S.) the possessions of slave children; store-bought dolls were a luxury few could afford.

In the early nineteenth century, commercially made black dolls appeared on store shelves and in catalogs. Manufactured in Germany and France, the "heartland" of toy production in this era, the dolls, while rare, were sold in the U.S. These dolls were likely owned by whites and "were made to be used as supplementary dolls, used in play situations as maids, servants, slaves, etc., for the white dolls."³ Most were fashioned after adult females and dressed "to represent household slaves"⁴; Reno notes that such dolls "were made to resemble mammies," and "are often holding tiny white babies, symbolizing the mammy's role in the household."⁵

In the mid-1800s, production of black dolls came to American shores. Reno notes that by the early twentieth century, U.S. productions were rare and, when available, often "character dolls" made for the kitchen use of whites: these dolls could hold whisk brooms or cover toasters.⁶ Like earlier renditions, these dolls reinforced notions about black servitude and subservience. Similarly, U.S. productions that "tended to play up the comic aspects of . . . black dolls" reinforced dominant popular mythologies about blacks; their emergence echoes the "Jump Jim Crow" caricature that came to light in the U.S. through popular minstrelsy routines in the early nineteenth century.⁷ Add to this the fact that virtually all black dolls in this era were produced from the same mold as white dolls and merely dyed or painted a darker color, with no attempt to craft dolls with "ethnically correct features."⁸ Perhaps expectedly, black families felt prompted to boycott mass-produced dolls in favor of homemade productions.⁹

Black dolls with ethnically correct features emerged as early as the 1950s and 1960s, amidst the "growing awareness" caused by the burgeoning Civil Rights movement.¹⁰ Buster cites Sarah Lee Creech, a white civil rights activist, with leading "an early effort to produce a black doll that was more than just a browner shade of pale."¹¹ Perkins credits two companies -- Remco Industries, which "introduced four 'ethnically correct' Negro dolls" designed by black artist Annuel McBurrows in the late 1960s, and Shindana Toys, "the first large-scale national black-owned-and-operated doll manufacturing company" -- with popularizing realistic-looking black dolls.¹² These dolls were widely embraced by blacks in the U.S.

Since the 1950s and 1960s, a new kind of black doll owner has emerged: the doll collector. While doll collecting has existed in some form since the nineteenth century (primarily as a pastime for "a few refined ladies"), black doll collecting gained momentum in the later half of the twentieth century, with the establishment of the nation’s first black doll museum in 1988 and the publication of several black doll collectors guides. Today, the black doll collecting community thrives through conventions, online publications, and regional collector networks.

Notes:
1. Myla Perkins, Black Dolls: An Identification and Value Guide, 1820-1991 (Paducah, Ky.: Collector Books, 1993), p. 5.
2. Larry Vincent Buster, The Art & History of Black Memorabilia (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2000), p. 130.
3. Perkins, p. 6.
4. Ibid.
5. Dawn E. Reno, The Encyclopedia of Black Collectibles: A Value and Identification Guide (Radnor, Pa.: Wallace-Homestead Book Co., 1996), p. 103.
6. Ibid., p. 104.
7. Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. xiv.
8. Buster, p. 132.
9. Perkins, p. 80.
10. Ibid., p. 102.
11. Buster, p. 132.
12. Perkins, p. 102-103.