Black Dolls as Public History: Silent Witnesses to a Silencing of the Past
The 2022 exhibition Black Dolls at the New-York Historical Society, curated by Dominique Jean-Louis and Museum Director Margi Hofer, used a private collection of handmade Black dolls, largely comprised of handmade cloth dolls from the 19th century whose makers are mostly unknown, but which are largely believed to have been made by Black women. The exhibition presented the historical context of slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow alongside the dolls as both creative work and connection points to the past. Dominique will detail the advent of this exhibition, curatorial process, and reflect on larger issues of private collecting, museum collections, under-valued voices in history, and the role that museum work can play in addressing larger absences in the historical method.
View a virtual tour of the exhibition here.
Co-sponsored by History, the Polenberg Fund, and the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection.
Dominique Jean-Louis is the Chief Historian of the Center for Brooklyn History at the Brooklyn Public Library. Previously, she held the position of Associate Curator of History Exhibitions at New-York Historical Society, where she co-curated Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow (2018), Our Composite Nation: Frederick Douglass’ America (2022), and is the co-curator of Black Dolls (2022). She is a former Mellon Predoctoral Fellow in Museum Education at the Museum of the City of New York, where she also contributed to the exhibition New York at Its Core (2016). She received her B.A. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from Columbia University, and is completing her doctoral dissertation at NYU on race, education, and immigration in post-Civil Rights Era New York City. Dominique regularly writes and lectures on Blackness in America, schools and education, and New York City history.