About the Dolls in the Window series...

The series of oil paintings and charcoal drawings called Dolls in the Window, evolved while I was living in the Tuscan countryside between Florence and Siena during the academic year 1999-2000 while I was teaching at Studio Art Center International, a study abroad art school in Florence. For the six previous years I had been deeply involved in the Bare Bones series of drawings, which dealt with images from Chiapas, Mexico. The last two drawings, Bare Bones #46 and #47, depicted little woolen Chiapas dolls representing the Zapatistas guerrilla warriors from the indigenous uprising there of January, 1994. Chamula women had been making the dolls since the upheaval began, transforming the dolls they had made previously of everyday "typical" Mayans, by adding ski masks, roughly carved wooden machine guns, ammunition belts, and backpacks. Both kinds of dolls were made to sell to tourists by Chamula women and children.

These startling, crudely made dolls turn our customary image of dolls upside down. What are we to think of them? Are they playful and charming, or challenging and disturbing, innocent or terrifying? Are they real or fantastic, omnipotent or powerless, ethnographic or universal? Are they powerful metaphors or commercial products? What do they say about ethnicity, race, war, peace, power, struggle, violence, and the general conditions of conflict which plague so much of the world today?

I took the dolls with me in my suitcase when I went to Italy, assuming I would continue the Bare Bones series there. But instead, I found the contrast between the disturbing Chiapas warrior dolls and the peaceful Italian countryside profoundly thought-provoking. The oil paintings and charcoal drawings which resulted were the Dolls in the Window series. They depicted the Mexican dolls standing in my Italian studio window overlooking the bucolic countryside of vineyards, olive groves and medieval hill towns.

Inherent in the subject matter is the combination of aggression and serenity, of war and peace, of threat and beauty. But these contrasts grew more complex and layered by the realization that the bucolic Tuscan landscape that now looks so peaceful and harmonious was created over centuries not only by patterns of traditional agriculture but also by violent wars of conquest and defense. The eleventh century building which housed my studio had been bombed and evacuated during WWII.

As I worked on the paintings, agricultural traditions added a quiet echo to these thoughts, as spumes of white smoke began to arise in the fields outside my window. The farmers had begun burning their piles of winter clippings debris from the olive groves and vineyards. Their fires smoked ominously, spotted across the peaceful hillsides.