Topsy-turvy doll inspires Bethel artist
Bethel artist Nina Buxenbaum discovered her creative wellspring when she was just a child of 6 or 7, too young and far too innocent to grasp its significance.
Exploring a great aunt’s house in Aurora, N.Y., that was reputed to be a stop on the Underground Railroad, not far from the Harriet Tubman homestead in the Finger Lakes region, she found a doll abandoned in a hidden crawl space.
“It was a simple doll with a big dress,” she said, recalling her first impression. “It was so old and worn, it had no real features. But it had some yellow yarn and some white cloth and when you flipped it over it was a Black doll.”
Buxenbaum would soon learn that it was a topsy-turvy doll, a kind likely made popular as the embodiment of the impudent slave girl Topsy and her saintly savior Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Eventually, in painting and after painting, she would make the doll the embodiment of her own experience, as the daughter of a mixed-race mother and white father, and of America’s ongoing struggle with slavery.
“To me it was a perfect way to describe how I felt as a biracial person who looked outwardly different than how I felt inside. Because for me I’m a Black woman, but because physically I don’t have dark skin I’m not readily identifiable that way. So that created this kind of conflict,” she said.
“It also is a metaphor for American history; this dress that hides the Black bodies that built this country. So I thought about how that would feel, to one day lift up the dress and see this other person that you didn’t know existed, that you didn’t associate yourself with, but you are one being.”
Few of Buxenbaum’s paintings — besides working in oil, she also does mixed media pieces and drawings — reproduce the doll itself. Instead, she populates them with women, most of them young, who often appear joined at the hip just like the doll.
In one large oil painting titled “The Other One,” a dark-skinned woman with dreadlocks is reading a book to a pale, red-haired woman sprawled lazily on a lush lawn. One historical meaning attached to topsy-turvy dolls is that they replicated the fraught dren and the children of their white owners.
In another, titled “Good Hair,” a Black woman with straight hair straddles a light-skinned woman. They share the same purple gown. But the dark, controlling woman appears to be teasing her companion’s bouffant of gleaming white hair. That woman is herself in a Marie Antoinette wig, Buxenbaum said.
In a third, “Black Lives,” a painting more clearly set in the present moment, a dark skinned woman in a Black Lives Matter t-shirt reclines on one arm while a prone redhead, also in a T-shirt, extends one arm forward as if pleading for help from an unseen observer. They are in a waterfront park with the New York skyline in the background.
Buxenbaum, who often uses friends and relatives as models, said the dark-skinned woman is her sister and the redhead is a cousin from her father’s side of the family. Her paired women only occasionally declare themselves as Black and white, however. The spectrum of their skin color, combined with their hair trick the viewer into seeing something not there, or overlooking what is.
By the same token, she puts her women in positions where they may appear to be fighting or playing, happily attached or trying to escape one another. Some pairs could be conjoined twins, bound together forever. In other pairings, one emerges from the other as if born fully grown.
“They have all those possibilities,” Buxenbaum said. “People have seen them as one birthing another. It could be about sexuality. It could be about gender fluidity. What I like is the ambiguity. It becomes the viewer’s perspective projected onto the paintings.”
In fact, her paintings emit such mixed signals, just about physical stereotypes, they could pass as a kind of racial profiling test. She has exhibited them in solo shows at the New Canaan Library and at the First Congressional Church in Stamford as well as at York College, a CUNY campus in Queens, where she is on the faculty; in Baltimore, one of the places she studied art; and in New Orleans, ures prominently in her own history.
Buxenbaum said she looks like her mother, who has African and European roots. But her mother belonged to the New Orleans Black community and grew up when Jim Crow segregation was still enforced. Her mother’s father, a college professor and civil rights activist, died when she was 13, from head injuries he received delivering voter registration forms to a sheriff's office. When her mother brought Buxenbaum’s white Jewish father to New Orleans to meet her family she had to introduce him as a Black man because mixed marriages were illegal.
Buxenbaum herself grew up in ethnically diverse Brooklyn, but learned an important lesson from her mother. “My mom was very clear to me, my sister and my brother.” she said. “We could choose to identify however we want, but when we go out in the world we are People of Color.”
At the elite Stuyvesant High School and then studying art at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, a city with starker divisions between Black and white, she was challenged about her affiliations. “People would question why I identified as Black because I could have passed as something else,” she said.
As a college art major, she concentrated in printmaking because she did not feel accepted as a painter. After graduating in 1996, she went to France to study and then to the Maryland Institute College of Art for a master’s degree. She was in a residency at Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine when she began exploring the topsy-turvy doll motif.
Buxenbaum had to overcome feeling negated as an artist. “Part of the impetus to paint in a traditional western style was to be seen as legitimate. Finally I got to a place where I didn’t need to have others acknowledge me as an artist,” she said.
“I always think of that James Baldwin quote: ‘You realize the country you call your own has never conceived a space for you.’ That was how I felt growing up. I didn’t fit. There was no space for me. My paintings created that space.”
Buxenbaum moved to Bethel in 2009. She has two school-age children and recently began teaching at Western Connecticut State University. She said she’s not done with the topsy-turvy doll, but lately has begun a painting series examining Black people’s connection to the land. Her abiding interest in environmentalism had been suppressed by being told, in effect, you love trees more than Black people.
She sees the Black Lives Matter protests and the awakening to racism as an acknowledgement of the idea behind her topsy-turvy paintings that Black and white are bound together. “One does not exist without the other,” she said. “Our humanity is linked to each other. There’s no us and them and they. There’s we and us.”