Welcome to Aunt Len’s Doll and Toy Museum! Behind the pink door of a three story Harlem brownstone lies a world created by Lennon Holder Hoyte – affectionately known as Aunt Len. The dolls from her “dollection” seek to keep Aunt Len, their beloved museum founder, alive before the outside world can invoke its realities of life, ashes and dust. As Harlem deteriorates around her beloved doll museum, the dolls recreate their journeys to the museum in an effort to keep Aunt Len’s memory alive. Enter the world of The Harlem Doll Palace.

POST SHOW DISCUSSION

The Harlem Doll Palace highlights the work of Lenon Holder Hoyte, founder of Aunt Len’s Doll and Toy Museum.  In this panel discussion Alva Rogers, playwright and lead performer in the show, Annalisa Dias, co-director, Ashley Winkfield, director and Dr. Paulette Richards, author of Object Performance in the Black Atlantic:  The United States, will reflect on why doll play was serious business for Aunt Len.  Panelists will provide an overview of Holder Hoyte’s association with the La Fargue clinic, which offered mental health services to Harlem residents from 1946 – 1959.  Then they will discuss the evolution of the show which has included live actors playing dolls, dolls manipulated as puppets, and puppets constructed to represent dolls, considering the dramaturgical objectives and consequences of these choices.  This examination of the line between dolls and puppets further echoes Robin Bernstein’s assertion that dolls trouble the boundary between person and thing.   Bernstein associates Black dolls with “the terror at the ontological core of slavery” since the slaveholding system tried to define one class of humans as things.  Thus, the panelists will conclude with reflections on how The Harlem Doll Palace uses dolls to work the powerful sympathetic magic of figuring Black people as empowered human beings.

DR. PAULETTE RICHARDS BIO

Independent researcher, Dr. Paulette Richards co-curated the Living Objects:  African American Puppetry exhibit at the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute and Museum with Dr. John Bell.  Her book, Object Performance in the Black Atlantic:  The United States won a 2024 Nancy Staub Award for excellence in writing on the art of puppetry from UNIMA-USA.  Her traveling exhibit, The Wonderland Puppet Theater ran at the Ballard from August to December 2024.  She is currently a Transformative Truth-Telling Fellow at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.