La Maison Rouge Gallery Opens “Black Dolls: The Deborah Neff Collection” | Vogue

"Just after Paris Fashion Week, I took the Métro to Bastille, walked a few blocks, and stepped into “Black Dolls: The Deborah Neff Collection”—and burst into tears. Inside, about 200 dolls dating from 1840 to 1940 are on display: from the most modest, touching efforts—a mere sock and rag with eyes—to figures that demonstrate dazzling needlework skills, proud survivors of an unspeakable time in American history and far from the demeaning representations that dominated the larger culture, assumed to be made largely by African-American women. In the years before the Civil War, when enslaved individuals were forbidden to paint or sculpt, to learn to read or write, the artists who created these works managed a stunning rebuke to those strictures. The show frames them as toys meant to be loved—nursemaids and newsboys; elegant sisters in their Sunday best; gentlemen out for a stroll in striped vests—as well as humbler figures in flour-sack outfits, their faces and bodies given life with cloth, leather, wood, and found materials. One area sequesters small dolls in shadow boxes like windows, as if they wished they could know how it feels to be free; another offers variations of topsy-turvy dolls, two-headed girls that flip over with a black head on one end and a white one on the other, joined at the waist so they can never look each other in the eye." - Lynn Yaeger