NY Historical Society BETYE SAAR’S BLACK DOLLS

So much to savor at the New York Historical Society...

With engaging movies about New York narrated by the likes of famed actress Meryl Streep, or detailed original source material of historian Robert Caro’s scribbles to construct his multi-volume biography of LBJ, and extensive collections of Old Masters NEW AMSTERDAM, and also a comprehensive exhibit of Native American art, one might think to skip the small doll collection in a relatively tiny room at the grand New York Historical Society.

DON’T!

In this age of federal authorities trying to cultivate anti-DEI sentiment, Betye Saar’s Black Dolls strikes this reviewer as a poignant counter to all attempts to whitewash our shared history.

We are intrigued by so-called topsy turvy dolls. Saar’s collections includes one topsy turvy doll that is either Black or White depending on how you flip her skirt. Another Saar topsy turvy doll is of one race on one side, with the other race shown with help of a mirror.

Seeing the dolls en masse, and a picture of the artist happily holding many of her dolls in her arms, we are reminded of how most of the dolls one sees in toy stores still reflect the dominant White culture. You too might feel that Saar’s joyful watercolors inspired by her collections leave us hungering for re-do’s of classic children’s books in her inimitable style— from The Little Prince, to Charlotte’s Web, to all the Seuss books and beyond.

We learn from the exhibit’s co-curator, Rebecca Klassen, who is a curator of material culture and decorative arts at the The New York Historical that the exhibit shows 24 dolls with 14 Saar watercolors. She elaborates—

“…The exhibition highlights Saar’s life as a collector—a practice that has paralleled and fed her artmaking. She began collecting things as a young person but took it up in earnest after seeing an exhibition of Joseph Cornell’s assemblages in 1967. Deciding that she wanted to explore that artform herself, she quickly began to amass materials. It was around this time that she acquired her first Black doll.

Saar has often noted that when gathering objects to use as materials for her assemblages, she is drawn to them for the energies that reside within. Her sense of these energies may be connected to an object's aesthetic qualities, or the form’s cultural and social meanings, or the sense that the object itself has had a rich past life and retains a sort of memory. She is similarly drawn to Black dolls for what she perceives of the energies they carry…”