The Serious Business of Doll Play: Alva Rogers, Dr. Paulette Richards & the Legacy of Lenon Holder Hoyte

Lenon and her husband purchased the three-story brownstone at 5 Hamilton Terrace between Convent and St. Nicholas Avenues in Harlem in 1938, which became the home of the museum. Hoyte’s passion for doll collecting began in 1962 when she was asked to organize a doll show fund-raiser for Harlem Hospital. Hoyte then turned part of her brownstone into Aunt Len’s Doll and Toy Museum. The public spaces of her home museum consisted of narrow passageways winding through the ground floor and basement. From 1970 according to Dolls magazine or 1974 if your source is the New York Times through 1994, Hoyte served as the full-time executive director, president, curator, and tour guide. Admission fees never exceeded $2 for adults and 50¢ for children. At one time, the museum held close to 6,000 dolls ranging in size from 1 inch to 3 feet. Fine French bisque dolls cavorted alongside presidents and first ladies, Shirley Temple, Betsy Wetsy, Barbie, and Cabbage Patch Kids. Hoyte’s collection included extremely rare and singular 19th-century Black dolls, including rag dolls made by enslaved people from scraps of muslin and feed bags, and a pair of papier-mâché dolls named Lillian and Leo, created by Leo Moss, a 19th-century Black handyman from Atlanta. Legend claimed that after separating from his wife and children, Moss only made sad dolls. Lillian and Leo had tears running down their cheeks. 

Aunt Len’s Doll and Toy Museum was a community place open to all, a home museum offering children of all ages the chance to engage, hands-on, with dolls and other material objects; to absorb social and cultural history; and to express their unfettered imaginations. Historically, the work of women of color, and doll /object play research, have not been considered scholarly topics. Hoyte believed otherwise. Hoyte worked tirelessly to create a cultural institution for the ages, to turn the status of her museum from a perceived novelty to a seminal and prominent institution. Hoyte became a highly respected expert and was consulted by international aficionados, dealers, and collectors alike. Unlike the once-unknown Arturo Schomburg, who found support for his life’s work in similarly-unrespected territory, Len was unable to turn her passion into an endowed institution like Schomburg’s Center for Research in Black Culture. However, that was her intention and she held a million-dollar fundraising drive to enable moving the contents of her home museum into a five-story, four-building complex, “We’ve already go the buildings picked out,” Hoyte was quoted in the September/October 1985 issue of Dolls Magazine.

Alva Rogers’ the doll plays has long informed Dr. Paulette Richards’ theoretical insights about African American object performance. She notes in particular how Alva Rogers deploys a topsy turvy doll (two dolls in one, fused at the waist with a single skirt – to play with the Black half-doll, one flips the skirt over the white half-doll, and vice versa). In the doll plays, such a doll draws attention to the fact that the enslaved child whose mother has made her this toy is actually the half-sister of the young white girl she serves.  Whatever the origins of topsy turvy dolls they function as performing objects similar to transformation puppets. Dr. Richards references the play in several crucial sections of her forthcoming book Object Performance in the Black Atlantic (Routledge 2O23), concluding that “the doll plays enact Aunt Len’s deathbed remembrances with live actors playing dolls from her collection.  The show plays with scale by also having the doll characters manipulate doll puppets. the doll plays culminates when the dolls transform Aunt Len into a doll to keep her safe, so in a sense Rogers animates dolls as performing objects in the realm of ritual. Rogers and Richards presented on the doll plays at the 2020 Women’s Theater Festival.  Subsequently, Dr. Richards, as a member of the advisory board for the University of Connecticut’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, brokered the inclusion of two Kara Walker shadow puppets from the doll plays in the museum’s Puppetry’s Racial Reckoning Exhibit which ran from May 28-October 30, 2021

As Alva explains, “The Serious Business of Doll Play” is meaningful now because current events have created the need for enchantment and inspiration from our past to give us direction, hope, and solace. I am inspired by Hoyte, an artist, and a retired NYC school teacher who wanted museum-goers of all ages to address her affectionately as Aunt Len. As a motherless daughter, I was obsessed with dolls, but I did not grow up with many. My father never purchased dolls for me, but I remember learning how to make cloth dolls as a child. When I would go on vacations or travel for work, I would always seek antique shops and look for dolls and other antiques. I could not always purchase them, but I photographed said dolls. So, when I learned in the late 80s of a doll museum in NYC, I had to find it immediately. I was called to it as a place to engage with my inner child’s imagination. Upon first arriving in Hoyte’s glorious Harlem brownstone, I was in awe upon being led through the museum’s parlor floor and basement galleries. I made several additional visits but each connection with Aunt Len became more difficult. She began to forget our appointments – and my name –  until she saw my face. Yes, dementia was moving in on Aunt Len – on one of my last visits, a neglected pipe burst and flooded the museum.

Fast forward to 1999. I was a first-year graduate student at Brown University in Creative Writing. While reading The New York Times obituaries, I see Aunt Len has died, and most items in her collection were auctioned at Sotheby’s to private collectors to pay for her care. I was saddened to learn that not only had Aunt Len passed, but NYC was unable to care for this treasure. Neither Schomburg nor the Museum of the City of New York recognized the gem in their midsts. It was then I decided to write my graduate thesis about Aunt Len and what she had created for the children of Harlem. 

Our culture values neither the historical importance of doll play, nor the “home” and “creative-at-home-work” of women of color, as activities worthy of humanist scholarship. But what Aunt Len put into collecting, researching, and contextualizing her dolls was scholarship. I must resuscitate Aunt Len’s vital and indispensable life’s work for the greater common good.