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.”
Little’s titles are both deft and heavy-handed. “Good Black Don’t Crack,” “Jet Black,” “Blue Black,” and “The Blacker the Berry.” The titles let you know a train is a-comin’, but the direction isn’t so obvious. You gotta keep your eyes open.
“There’s so many things happening in this body of work, it’s exciting to see,” says Susan Dyson Jones, Assistant Director at the Center of the Earth Gallery.
“One of the exciting things is how the artist is reacting with and against the other art historical traditions and other artists. The way he’s using these little dolls that look like they’ve been in some gift shop or picked up on a trip to Florida have become part of what we are used to seeing. But the way he’s working with these found objects, it twists and shapes and forms other connections with what these things can mean. He’s also doing it with humor, taking the different titles and taking these different other phrases that we have associations with as far as blackness — ‘the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,’ for instance — and playing with the images. There’s a tin of blackberries, and oranges and fruit. There’s a black background, shiny and textured. You just start to get so many different layers of how you can look at it, and all the different potential meanings. When you start to look at it all as a body of work, you see that he sort of takes apart these ideas we have, and gets us to think about them in new ways.”
A white person may eye these dolls suspiciously, concerned that his or her attitudes are being unjustly (or justly) ridiculed. A liberal White may sidle up to the artist and knowingly (and wrongly) snicker at these lowbrow, high-gloss embarrassments. These dolls and the artworks which incorporate them are both sinister and innocent, corrupt and coy. The work is reasonably biased, amusing, and life-affirming. Willie Little graces us with the ability to laugh at attitudes, possible even our own.
In “The Sweeter the Juice,” another naked nodder doll sits beneath a gabled roof on top of and between two large oranges. “Florida” is stamped on one orange. The oranges and the baby sit atop a box with an old label: Carolina Beauty; contents 1 lb. 30oz.; Blackberries. A finely rendered painting of blackberries illustrates the contents. On the painted black ground beneath the child/box assembly is an open book with a child’s cursive scrawl: “The blacker the berrys, The sweeter the juice.” Under that is a water pipe and spigot. It’s a clever piece, which, like many of the pieces here, uses the artist’s maternal grandmother’s spirit as muse.
Little tells of his grandma Flora Ann who fascinated him as a child with her quick wit and command of colloquialisms. She was the jumping off place for these works. He explains in his writings on this show: “Before the ‘Black Is Beautiful’ movement of the 1960s, generations of dark-skinned African Americans were the brunt of racial slurs and insults from within and without the Black Community, particularly in the South. Those with healthy appreciation for their dark hues learned quickly to combat the slurs with vivid colorful retorts. Grandma would say, ‘The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.'”
In this show, race is looked at with a clear eye, uncorrupted by self-loathing, bitterness or anger. Little’s eye is clear, but not blind: He sees the old and tired stereotypes, and he has reworked the bias with humor, understanding and perhaps forgiveness.
But is Willie Little playing with us? Is he playing with a shared stereotype, mocking a slightly embarrassing but nonetheless darling cultural toy? He appears to be both praising and laughing at a toy once used to help others laugh at him. Well, shame on him — he’s playing with the notion that perceptions of character are routinely based on something as random as skin color. And he’s not doing it by shaking his head and looking at the ground. He looks at himself and the world looking at him, he wonders, and he celebrates the grand, the silly and the sad. And he invites us along.
“Everything your eye has ever seen before you stand before an object helps you determine what that object is,” Noel says. “Willie grew up in a small town. He knows those farms stood side by side each other, and things said on one side of the fence were also said on the other side of the fence. I think with this exhibit Willie just sort of removes the fence.”
“I just hope people at my exhibits engage in some inner dialogue, and with other folks,” says Little. “I want people to see the work and voice their own history and see that there’s so much going on. Right now in my work, I like to make people laugh and think. I’m just trying to push my own envelope, that’s all.”
“Black As. . .(looking behind the stereotype) is on exhibit through June 25 at Noel Gallery in Transamerica Square, Suite 104, 401 N. Tryon St. For details, call 343-0050. *
This article appears in Jun 5-11, 2002.
