Black dolls
The dolls you see here, rescued from the vast diaspora of their kin by Deborah Neffand bound together in a work of art by Radius Books, will inevitably be admired as sculptural objects and as fine examples of a folk art passed down through generations from roughly 1850 to 1940. They are that to be sure. And yet in their time, as perhaps in ours, they have done and perhaps still can do something more important than stand in vitrines: they give us an unusual part of African-American culture—an art without reference to suffering, oppression, exclusion. Here they are, each one bold, unexpected, beautifully improvised, mute, and glorious. Between the covers of the book, Black Dolls, Margo Jefferson has written of her childhood as a black child with white dolls, and Faith Ringgold of hers as a black child with black dolls, but no one has written the untold histories behind the dolls in these pages. The collector, Deborah Neff, the editor, Frank Maresca, and the photographer, Ellen McDermott, have let them and the vintage photographs that Neff collected to accompany them speak for themselves. In an overly-explained world that is as important a gesture as assembling the collection itself. – Elizabeth Pochoda The following essay is excerpted from Black Dolls, recently published by Radius Books and the Mingei International Museum. Fig. 1. Weary Woman, American, late nineteenth century. Mixed fabrics and leather; height 24 inches. Except as noted, the objects illustrated are in the collection of Deborah Neff; photographs by Ellen McDermott. Miniature trains and boats; animals and picture books; balls that bounce and tops that spin: these toys belong to non-human worlds. Dolls are the only toys made in our image, the only human-like creatures children are given dominion over. You, the child, are the creator of