If you’ve ever seen a Hummel figurine, it’s hard to forget the sickeningly sweet ideal of childhood that they promulgate. The collectible ceramic knickknacks — which depict rosy-cheeked, blond children wearing vapid expressions of mild surprise — would make any postmodernist cringe. They’re the kind of kitschy, pop cultural curiosity Roland Barthes would have deconstructed with glee, peeling back a veneer of innocuousness to reveal nefarious ideological currents pulsing underneath (e.g., fantasies of racial purity and childhood naivety).
Attracted to their strangeness, artist Andréa Keys Connell had her first encounter with Hummel figurines as an undergraduate studying ceramics. As a flippant gesture to a class assignment, she sculpted a purposefully tacky ashtray that incorporated a miniature, Hummel-esque child as a chronic smoker, unable to breathe without the assistance of an oxygen machine. (Activities more typical of Hummel figurines include communing with small animals and seeking shelter from raindrops under large umbrellas.) Years later, Keys was less interested in irony when the figures reemerged in her mind as inspiration for a very different body of work.
An exhibition of that work is now on view at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg.
This article appears in Aug 5-11, 2010.