Chris Malone

by Ricë Freeman-Zachery

Reprinted with permission from: Art Doll Quarterly Autumn 2007, "Doll Artist Profile: Christopher Malone"

Chris Malone is a man of many stories and many, many adventures. As a zoo-keeper at the National Zoo in Washington, DC, he worked with the giant pandas Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, arguably the zoo’s most famous residents. During his years as a sought-after model, his likeness appeared on a giant Converse billboard in New York City. And, as a nationally-recognized doll artist, his work is carried by Stella Jones Gallery in New Orleans, the largest African-American-owned gallery in the world.

On the morning of this interview, however, Chris wasn’t fielding phone calls or working on one of his intricately-beaded pieces. He had gotten out of bed at 5:30 am, in the Washington, DC, row house he shares with his partner, Bill, and their menagerie, to begin taking care of his pair of Von der Decken Hornbills. He’s had these East African birds for three years without a hint of a chick, and he hopes that this is the year.

“They’re trying to nest, and I’ve given them a nest box. The male is trying to entice the female into the nest box,” says Chris, who spends his early mornings cutting up their fruit and soaking it for them, giving them the perfect diet (twice-a-day feedings) and environment (the cushy next box) for producing little hornbills. What do birds have to do with making dolls? Quite a bit, it turns out. What seem like several separate threads—working with animals, modeling, creating figures from wire and clay and fabric and beads—are, instead, the intertwined strands of an amazingly artistic life.

“When I was a kid, I made things—little farm animals out of oil clay,” Chris says of a childhood spent on a farm in southern Indiana. “They were really well done. I would make a horse that looked like a horse and people that looked like people. The things I make now are nothing like I used to make. Then the hands were the size hands should be. Everything would look the way it should.” When he complained about the oil clay, which got messy and covered with lint and dust, his mother gave him Play-Doh. “But Play-Doh was for kids, and I didn’t want that. I wanted the things I would see in the art books. I wanted to know how to do that stuff.” He was curious about everything, about how things worked and how they were put together.

“I can hear my sister screeching, ‘Mom! Chris is playing with my dolls again!’ But I wasn’t playing with them; I was trying to figure out how they were made. I always wanted to make dolls. In every group, you have people who are healers, and you have people who dream and people who interpret dreams, and you have people who make dolls. Everybody has a gift, and you have to know what your gift is.” While his younger brother received toy motorcycles and trucks as presents, Chris always got birds—some with simple feathers, like his pigeons, and some with gorgeous plumage, like the peacocks. When he began making his very first dolls, it was no wonder that he found a way to work feathers into almost every one. He takes care, though, to use only acceptable feathers: none from birds that are endangered, and none from native birds, whose use is prohibited by law.

The intertwining of passions began during Chris’s years with the Boston Zoo, where he worked with the exotic birds he had loved reading about as a child. One day after work he found himself in front of the windows at Tiffany’s, studying the Santa figures on display.

“I guess I was out there for two hours, looking at these and going from window to window. They were so beautiful. This guy came out and asked if I was OK.” Chris asked about the figures, and the man told him they were made of wax. That didn’t sound right, so Chris returned the next day and found someone who explained to him about craft clay. He went to a craft store and bought a package of Sculpey and took it home and began to work with it, experimenting and seeing what it would do.

“I started making these fairies. Everybody was doing fairies in the late 1980’s. Some were great and some were horrible, but everybody was doing them. It’s kind of like, ‘I can do that. I can do much better than that.’” His fairies were two to three inches long, with—of course—tiny feathers for wings. Many birds, like the hornbills, shed constantly, providing a ready supply of feathers with no harm to the birds. So Chris made a series of tiny, delicate fairies, and a friend took a box of them to the artists’ coop in Boston. They sold immediately, and the women in the shop asked for more. The second boxful also sold, and his friend told Chris it was time for him to take in the next group himself and meet the people in the shop. Chris carefully packed the tiny Caucasian fairies in a shoebox and carried them into the store, setting the box on the counter.

The women asked, “Oh, did you pick these up on the floor?” thinking that someone had delivered the box to the door.

Chris said, “No, I’m Chris.”

They asked, “Chris who?”

“I’m Chris Malone. I make these.”

He says, “These ladies, their faces just fell. Before people meet an artist, they create in their mind who this person is.” Although the first two boxes of fairies had sold immediately, Chris got a letter the next week saying that the shop didn’t want to carry his work any more. He was 22.

“That’s the way the world works,” he says simply. “Not everybody is going to be enlightened.” The good part of the experience, as Chris sees it now, is that it made him stop and think about what it was inside himself that he wanted to express. He knew there was something there—the fascination with how dolls are made, the interest in detail and in incorporating natural elements, like the feathers of his birds—but he wasn’t yet sure of what it was.

“You look in the magazines, you don’t really see a lot of things that represent you, things that have your features and your skin color. I think it’s really important if you’re going to be true to what you’re doing, you have to work from the inside of yourself.” As a black man in America, Chris explains, he doesn’t have much information about his ancestors, about who they were and where they came from or what tribe they might have belonged to. When he moved to Washington, DC, to work at the National Zoo, he discovered the African museum at the Smithsonian, full of marvelous exhibits of art and costume and history. Even after a dozen years in the city, Chris still visits the museum at least twice a week, finding inspiration in every display. And when he began to make the figures that came from his soul, instead of whatever dolls were popular in the doll world, he found that not only was he more comfortable and excited about the process, but that people responded to what he was doing.

Chris’s African and New Guinean dolls are lively and colorful, well-researched and expertly crafted. But what draws people in is the expressive faces on his figures, some of which are over seven feet tall. Their eyes, often twinkling with humor, make them seem alive; and their dynamic poses add to the sense that these characters, while not realistically proportioned, are people who have been captured in the middle of an exuberant dance.

“I want them to be in dance poses, in a dance circle, telling stories about the past and future,” says Chris. “I think when I get to a certain point with them, they seem to have a presence. And whether people love your work or hate your work, you want your pieces to have a presence.”

The heads, sculpted from Cernit, are attached to an armature of aluminum wire wrapped on batting. Next Chris lays out all the fabrics and beads and trims and starts putting it all together.

“And then I wait to start beading as long as possible!” he laughs. “It takes so freaking long. It takes you sooo long.” He raves about the Bead Spinner, a wooden bowl with a spindle in the middle that uses centrifugal force to push beads onto a string or wire, that has dramatically reduced the number of hours it takes to string beads. It’s right up there with the sewing machine in making the process so much faster; Chris loves the Singer that Bill gave him two years ago.

“Praise the lord for it!” he says. “I’ve met people who do everything by hand and are very proud of themselves for that. I’m nutty about this stuff, but I’m not that nutty!” He does admit to having taken apart many finished pieces that just didn’t make any sense to him.

“I’ll have a piece that’s complete, and I’ve been looking at it for like six months; and it just doesn’t make any sense. If it were in a gallery, it might sell quickly, but to me it doesn’t make any sense. As an artist, you can’t put your name on something that isn’t completely you. Then you pull out the scissors and the hammer. I’ve taken plenty of things apart.” His advice to beginning artists is that they need to realize that they’re not alone. “All the things you’re going through, all the doubts you’re having about yourself, every other artist has done the same thing. Anybody else tells you different, they’re not being truthful.” He believes that there is so much more to dolls than just their structure and embellishment. They are about a spirit, about something we as a people need to fill our souls.

“There’s so much more there. There’s something more spiritual, and I think our spiritual side is picking up on it. As a tribe, we need these things; we need the healers and the dreamers and those who can interpret dreams. And we need the doll makers.”