Yétúndé Olagbaju

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Yétúndé Olagbaju’s On becoming a star series recuperates the figure of ‘Mammy’, a stereotype rooted in American slavery that typically depicts a larger, dark skinned woman as a maternal presence, often within a domestic setting, and typically taking care of white children. After being referred to as a Mammy during their undergraduate degree, Olagbaju began exploring the figure in 2016 as a means of healing. Olagbaju’s first presentation on this topic was a book called Black Collectibles: Mammy and Friends (1997) that sells tchotchkes—like salt and pepper shakers or figurines—of the racist mammy image taking different forms, from which Olagbaju exorcised the Mammy images by carefully cutting them out of the book with a razor blade.