![]() What remains virtually unknown, however, is the artist’s involvement with puppet theater and related professional activities. Thomas as an African American visual artist who, despite the challenges of race, gender, and age, produced a coherent body of brightly colored nature-based abstractions that made her world famous in the late 1970s. Thomas: “The Marionette Show as a Correlating Activity in the Public Schools” With a combination of sock puppets, humanettes, and marionettes, Baker shows, the program teaches kids Identity, Purpose, and Direction.Īlma W. During his incarceration Tychist Baker started studying, reading “hundreds of books,” and when he was released began collaborating with Milk Not Jails, with whom he worked on prison reform, and teaching martial arts and anti-rape training to kids through the One Foot In and One Foot Out program. Great Small Works theater company introduced Simon to puppetry, which he has used in his work with young people in youth detention centers, schools, and at-risk communities through the One Foot In and One Foot Out program, and later the creation of Inside Change. Simon became involved in theater in prison, and then with prison activism through RAPP (Release Aging People from Prison), and Milk Not Jails’ efforts to reform New York State parole boards. Belpré’s obvious talent and success as a puppeteer merits more research, and this presentation offers some paths of investigation.Īl Tony Simon and Tychist Baker describe their experiences as formerly incarcerated individuals, and their work with puppetry through the group Inside Change. She mentions that she started her first puppet theater in the 1930s at the Public Library’s Aguilar branch in an effort to recruit boys to participate in the children’s reading room activities. In her essay “Bilingual Storytelling” – which was recently republished in a recovery project based on her archival papers – Belpré offers some information about her introduction to puppetry at the 115th Street branch of the NYPL, and her study of puppetry at Columbia University. This essay discusses Belpré’s work in the children’s rooms of the New York Public Library system, including how and why she eventually created a mobile puppet theater. In many ways, Belpré is the Zora Neale Hurston of Afro-Caribbean American literary history-with a flamboyant, polyglot twist. The American Library Association has named a major children’s literature (now including Young Adult fiction) medal in her honor. publishing history: Perez and Martina (House of Warne, 1932). Among other firsts, Belpré wrote the first mainstream Latino storybook in U.S. Pura Belpré’s Puppetry at the NYPL Children’s Rooms: 1921-1982Īn extraordinary public intellectual of the Puerto Rican diaspora, Pura Belpré was born in Cidra, Puerto Rico in 1899 and died in New York City in 1982 after a prolific career as a children’s author, librarian, advocate, and puppeteer. ![]() Fisler argues that some white puppeteers, including Frank Paris, sought to portray such Black characters as Josephine Baker in a “potentially more positive” way, and suggests that any puppet performance of racial identity involves complex relationships between puppet and puppeteer that deserve deeper examination. Fisler details the extensive degree to which puppeteers in the early 20th century depended upon Black and blackface characters for their livelihood, and points out the complexities of such representations involving Black puppeteers of Federal Theater Project puppet companies, and the work of Creole puppet artist Ralph Chessé. ![]() ![]() The representation of Black identity through puppetry ranges from “grotesque exaggeration to near pictorial realism,” and engagement not only with racial stereotyping, but also the possibility of positive racial representation. Black and Blackface in the Performing Object: Bullock, Chessé, Paris, the Jubilee Singers, and the Burdens of … Everything ![]()
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