Ann Wroe
speaker
865 appearances
15 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 21 Aug
Ann Wroe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 15 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.
Appearances
Just rising in the middle of Watts and all the work of one man, Simon Rodia.
She was amazed
That he could make something beautiful out of what other people considered simply junk.
And had thrown away.
Certain objects, though, came to speak.
Very loudly to her.
They were things like lengths of rope or models of old three master ships.
or chains, or bird cages.
These all for her carried connotations of slavery,
As a black woman herself she could feel the weight of history in them.
And she began to incorporate them.
More and more into pieces of art.
She would put them together, and that became her comment.
On the slavery.
She became most famous though for recreating the image of the black mammy.
This was the figure of the black servant, usually plump and smiling, dressed in an apron and a kerchief, and with a broom.
who cleaned white folks' houses and cared for their children all through the twentieth century until about the nineteen sixties or so.
She could find these representations of black mammies.
all over the place when she looked in flea markets and so on, and so she consciously began to collect them.
And there was one in particular called Aunt Jemima, which showed again the Mammy with her broom, and in nineteen sixty eight Betty Sarr seized on this figurine it was a notebook holder.
Showing 281–300 of 865 · page 15 of 44
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