Architect, Mabel O. Wilson: I’m Mabel O. Wilson, and I’m a Professor of Architecture and Black Studies at Columbia University.
John Outterbridge is my uncle. My grandmother apparently used to make dolls when he was growing up in North Carolina, and The Ethnic Heritage Series is a series of dolls.
Artist, John Outterbridge: The doll series is a direct result of my daughter’s excitement about dolls as a little girl. And the research that I started to do, I started to understand that, not until recent times, was the doll a toy. But it was something that was the personification of a culture, and that interested me.
Mabel O. Wilson: My uncle John moves to Los Angeles in the mid-sixties, so right around the time of the Watts Riots. This work is constructed out of objects that he found after that uprising.
John Outterbridge: Broken Dance is a ballerina on an old World War II 50-caliber ammunition box...with one leg missing. But with the strength, the posture, seemingly, that the dance would continue. I think, for me, it said a lot about how the human spirit has the potential to take flight far beyond the reality and the insanity of war and poverty. The spirit surpasses all of that that. The whole spirit and the force of dance was what I tried to get in that piece.
The series gave me an opportunity to research folk medicines, recipes regarding voodooism, and things of that nature. I grew up around people who were immersed in that culture—superstitions and the great tales that you heard from the old folk. I looked at the doll series as a body of work that would extend the fabric of many of those tales.