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← STORIED OBJECTS / Orphan Tower
A rectangular plexiglass tower is covered by hundreds of small, colorful fabric dolls, each uniquely designed with fabric and beading.

Photo by Zvonimir Bebek, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives

Image Description Two sides are visible of a large, rectangular plexiglass tower standing over seven feet tall. Each side of the tower is covered with hundreds of small fabric dolls which are approximately four inches tall, each wearing a multicolored, printed fabric garment. Most of the doll faces are black, although there are a few that are brown, orange, or red, and there are a wide variety of hairstyles created with black yarn. The faces of the dolls are framed with small white beads, and each doll features white beaded eyes and a small red or white mouth.

Orphan Tower

The Orphan Tower draws you into the venue: a Plexiglas structure that extends more than seven feet towards the peak of the tent, enveloped by hundreds of handmade dolls each unique in its hairstyle, fabric dress, and decorative beadwork. And then you learn what they symbolize.

The power behind the “Orphan Tower”

This was made all the more poignant in the Common Threads tent, which was co-curated by the NAMES Project Foundation and the UCLA Art & Global Health Center. At the center was the “Orphan Tower,” made by the Siyazama (Zulu for “we are trying”) Project in South Africa, an organization developed in 1998 to work with women from the KwaZulu-Natal region. Its goals were to teach women market skills, inform them about HIV/AIDS transmission and prevention, and create a means to share information through traditional artistic skills and knowledge.

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  • Photos by Zvonimir Bebek, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives

Beauty Ndlovu and Lobolile Ximba came to the Festival to demonstrate doll making and beadwork. Visitors to the tent quickly learned that each of the 634 dolls on the tower represents a child who was orphaned because of AIDS in Dannhauser, KwaZulu-Natal. With a population of only 5,389 (2011), 634 dolls represent nearly one out of eight children—a staggering number made even more alarming through the use of a child-friendly object.

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  • The dolls were carefully mounted each morning and taken down at the end of the day. A simple system was devised to display the dolls by inserting a thumbtack on each back and slipping it into a slot cut into the Plexiglas.
    Photos by Carsten Schmidt and Zvonimir Bebek, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives

The Orphan Tower came into our possession after a derecho swept through the Festival grounds on June 29, 2012. The severe storm, with wind gusts measuring sixty to eighty miles per hour, destroyed tents, crushed tables, and sent the “Orphan Tower” with all its dolls into the mud. Even after borrowing office space in the Smithsonian Castle to lay out, clean, and dry the dolls with a fan, they could not be restored to their original likeness. The Center negotiated to acquire the dolls and the structure and reimbursed the UCLA Art & Global Health Center so that the women of Dannhauser could make another powerful teaching tool for their community.

—Arlene Reiniger, program curator
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