Yétúndé Olagbaju

A Chrysalis No. 2

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. With this act, and the many incarnations the gesture takes throughout the series, Olagbaju liberates Mammy from an exhausting existence as a culturally and racially charged entity, imagining the figure instead as a brilliant nebula reflecting across the cosmos. 

By revising Mammy’s origin story, the artist gives her, and themselves, a new agency that allows them to be obscured, unreadable, and vigorously independent. In A Chrysalis No. 2, Olagbaju’s first public presentation of sculptural work, Mammy is transformed into a bust cast in bronze, providing a three-dimensional view of the many forms she might take collapsed into one. By casting Mammy in immutable bronze, but crafting a thumbprint in place of facial features, Olagbaju both firmly anchors her in the known physical world and permanently obstructs any traditional way of understanding or relating to her on a domestic human level.