Black Memorabilia

Traveling from industrial China to the American South to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, Chico Colvard’s documentary takes an intent, close-up look at a category of early-20th-century collectibles sometimes referred to as “black memorabilia” — signs, household goods, figurines, and other unsettling tchotchkes that feature demeaning representations of African Americans. You could call them reminders of America’s troubled racial history — except that they continue to be manufactured. Viewers are transported to a factory in China’s Hebei Province to observe the mass reproduction of a coin bank molded into the caricatured likeness of an African American man. Later, the original artifact surfaces at the Raleigh, North Carolina state fairgrounds, among the wares of Joy, an antique dealer specializing in Civil War and KKK collectibles. And finally, in an act of reclamation, a Brooklyn artist named Alexandria reveals a “secret body of work”: a box of photographs in which she adopts the persona of a piece of black memorabilia, not in an act of minstrelsy, but to examine the power such images retain.