In my entryway at home, Ina Archer’s “Liberated Long Legs,” regards me with her small smile. (That’s her above). We have an understanding: I get to stare at her and she gets to teach me. Framed by messy braids tied with strips of yellow rags, her almond eyes gaze back at me. The thin white smile curves carefully from her black watercolor face. Her square head, about the size of a piece of Wonder Bread, balances on her long, skinny pole of a neck, the top and bottom of which are interrupted by silver-white patches that look like gaping holes. Though armless, “Liberated Long Legs” appears to be reaching for a hug. At least that’s what I think, probably because I want to hug her back. And as for her title, I can only imagine her long legs as she’s been severed at the waist.

Ina Archer is a DC-based film archivist, programmer, scholar and multi-media artist whose work addresses and repositions historical representations of blackness across various media. My husband and I discovered her at the Armory Show in 2023 where her gallery, Microscope, devoted their booth to her work.

Anchoring the exhibit was a multimedia triptych entitled “Osmundine (Orchid Slap)” which features a scene from the 1967 Oscar-winning film “In the Heat of the Night.” The scene is historically significant – it’s the first time a black man strikes a white man in an American movie. In an opulent greenhouse filled with orchids, a police detective played by Sidney Poitier forcefully returns a plantation owner’s slap. Shock and awe were felt at the time. As Dessane Lopez Cassell wrote in Hyperallergic, “Many a movie goer likely clutched their pearls.”

In “Osmundine (Orchid Slap)” Archer mashes up, prolongs, reframes and repeats that historic moment. The sound echoed throughout Microscope’s Armory Show booth, a jarring soundtrack accompanying Archer’s haunting collages and paintings. Slap, slap, slap, slap, slap… In Archer’s rendition, Sidney Poitier’s hand strikes the cheek of the shocked bigot again and again and again. The slap rat-a-tatted like a hip hop instrumental track, somehow funny despite the subject matter, and we couldn’t leave the booth.

Archer mines historical films, toys and advertisements for racist depictions of Black men, women and children so that she can pull them from circulation, edit and then re-introduce them, thereby “removing the potency of their symbolism from the public discourse.” (Marija Olga).

The racially-charged dolls and artifacts she collects from flea markets, vintage stores and the internet provide subjects for her watercolors and collages. She uses words like liberated and emancipated in her titles because that’s what she’s doing for them. “All the portraits are altered slightly so that whatever characteristics make them identifiable as racial stereotypes are softened… It’s not redeeming but it is hopefully suggesting their possible complexity,” the artist explains.

Knowing that, I imagine “Liberated Long Legs” as half of one of the Topsy Turvey dolls in Archer’s collection. Dismembered. Separated. Removed from the context of the white doll that would have been her other half. She is free but also torn apart. Separated from the cultural forces that misrepresented her. Burdened by the responsibility of teaching a contemporary majority how to understand the deep rooted power of chronic misrepresentation.

Many of Archer’s watercolors depict both halves of Topsy Turvy dolls. In the case of “Liberated Long Legs” she stands proudly on her own, her white sister deleted. Challenging the visual canon, Archer reminds us of the ways history has deleted and omitted Black experience, especially women’s.

The closer I look, the more the doll teaches me. Against the background shimmering with silver paint, Archer stamped an uneven red checkered pattern. Could this be snippets of the tablecloth on which a young girl who owned the doll ate a picnic lunch? Digital distortion of the sort that befalls the early 20th century films Archer studies? Or abstracted cartoon tweety birds circling the doll’s head after being hit (or dismembered)? Her sunshiney dress with its gem-studded metallic belt is a decoy, distracting from the fact that the doll was made in the image of a child slave. Looking closely I discover her smile is actually one white line scrawled over a resting expression of sad resignation, like the smile painted over the Joker’s frown. And her too-long neck and too-black skin tone ultimately alienate a white audience, intentionally and successfully defamiliarizing the archetype.

An expert film archivist and programmer, Archer knows that the characters we grow up with, play with, imagine as our friends, and hug as we fall asleep, impact the way we see ourselves and our place in the world. They teach us what to value and what to fear. Toys and media representation help shape who we are and who we want to be when we grow up. Cloth dolls made in the 19th and early 20th century played a roll in designing and developing the racial constructions that still divide our society today.

Just as monuments are more than decorative public statues, dolls are more than neutral toys. They instruct the family that buys them and the children that play with them. The historian Dorothy Auchter Mays found that on some plantations, young slave girls were paired with daughters of their plantation owners to play the role of companions and servants. As Julian K. Jarboe wrote in the Atlantic, “In these situations, perhaps playing together with such explicitly racial toys helped children to internalize the social divisions between them, or perhaps it was a chance to forget them.”

“The problem hasn’t been solved,” the artist told the principals of Microsoft Gallery in a talk held in honor of the Armory exhibit. Archer gives us new ways to experience and process historical representations of blackness, encouraging us to sit and grapple with the ongoing ramifications. “Liberated Long Legs” is a powerful teacher, her smile indicating her radical and determined point of view.