June 05, 2002 News & Views » Cover

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Out of the Box 

Artist Willie Little gets playful with race

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One of the most striking works of art in the city is assembled within a boxed frame topped with a gable roof. Inside the frame sits a small black doll painted black -- very black. She has tightly curled hair, red lipstick and wide oversized eyes looking up and away. Her facial features are Betty Boop generic -- puffy cheeks and forehead, chinless with button nose. The child sits naked on a slice of ripe watermelon, her knees pulled together, hands resting primly on her knees. Behind the doll on a thick black ground of oil paint is an old box of Griffin Allwite shoe polish. On the box, a nurse stares, amazed, at a white shoe held before her; the copy claims, "The nurses' favorite -- resists rub-off." And that's the title of the work: "Resists Rub-off" (see cover of this issue).

Willie Little strikes again. Charlotte's favorite (adopted) native son has tuned his attentive ear and laser eye on the ageless issue of being black in America. The creator of the much-acclaimed Juke Joint exhibit of a couple of years ago, Little knows how to gently smile at a coy slur and make others laugh at it. The man doesn't know how to tiptoe past a cultural faux pas; he's just gotta kick it over, pick it up and give it a spin.

Back at "Resists Rub-off," the bottle of shoe polish and its sponge applicator stand adjacent to the black-child-on-watermelon statuette. It's a striking image -- at once funny and not funny, irritating and pleasing. The implication that one could simply pick up the applicator, unscrew the cap and paint the doll bright, sparkling white is obvious, and obviously absurd. The notion of whiteness, regardless of application, as something longed for, sought after, and indisputably superior is made laughable. Michael Jackson came to mind and I quickly chased him off. The beauty of the doll (as quirky and incorrect as she is), paired with the fixed hysterical smile of the illustrated nurse on the Allwite box, brings to mind the notion that Pablo Picasso should be completely written off because he was bald.

"Resists Rub-off" is just one part of Black As. . .(looking behind the stereotype), Willie Little's newest work now showing at Noel Gallery at Transamerica Square. This show unfolds a piece of Charlotte that makes me happy to live here. The work in the show unfolds a piece of the artist I haven't seen before. He's 40 and only getting better.

The bulk and best of Little's show are his nodder doll constructions. Nodder dolls? Little explains, "These dolls were made in Japan in the 1940s and 50s, sold to and marketed by white America yet are classified as Black Americana. . .These nodder dolls, considered 'collector's items,' become a mirror to the evolution of society's appreciation and value of the beauty of black skin."

Little collected the bouncy head dolls on his interminable junkets to flea markets and other venues for arcane collectibles. He re-introduces these curious, quaint and politically incorrect cultural icons with humor and irony, bobbing and prancing in on his red carpet of rural colloquialisms.

"I collected a lot of the dolls in 1998 and '99," says Little, who is currently in California on a fellowship. "I bought my first two at the Metrolina Expo. I just thought they were so beautiful. I could see myself in them, and a lot of other things too. I sort of did two, and then decided I would do a series. I told myself that I would find them. It was very serendipitous. I began to see them a lot. I would find one in Providence, or in an antique store or on the Internet. I let them sit on my mantelpiece, and told people that I was going to do an exhibit with my little stable of babies.

"They are so beautiful, yet they have a menacing quality to them," Little continues. "They have lots of layers. Each work was an exercise in seduction, composition, humor, social commentary, and conceptualism. Toward the end of working on the exhibit, I did a few more of the installation-type things I've always done. I went back to Metrolina. I had someone with me, who just wouldn't stop talking. I always have to go alone. He kept talking and walked on by, and I saw this baby carriage that would be perfect for the exhibit. I just stopped in my tracks. By the end of the day, I had this armful of baby-related objects. I met up with some people I know, who asked me, 'Willie, is there something we should know?' I always look strange at flea markets, I guess."

"At the end of the day, its all about advancing the artist -- and art -- forward," says the Noel Gallery's B.E. Noel. "He started with the Juke Joint exhibit, and now we have this. As anyone perfects their art form, whether it be music or writing, you learn to do more with less. You can imagine the journey of going from a huge building to being able to have the same impact with fewer objects on a smaller scale by honing the conversation that he's wanting to have. In some cases, there's only one object or two objects. The dolls kind of hold the whole thing together, and they're usually paired with a contrasting object, either contrasting the blackness of the doll or to make a sarcastic comment. He's also dealing with more painted surfaces. I see incredible sophistication in his ability to tell a story."

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