In honor of Betye Saar’s 100th birthday, and to celebrate her promised gift of more than 100 Black dolls to the museum, New York Historical has mounted an exhibition of 26 dolls from Saar’s collection—one of them designed and created by the artist—along with 14 doll watercolors and some of Saar’s signature assemblages. “As a child, I never had a Black doll,” Saar told Cultured Magazine in 2021. “I usually had dolls that my mother found, and every year she would repaint their hair or make a new dress. Black dolls were not manufactured back then.” In the late 1960s, Saar found a Black doll in a Los Angeles antique store, and her collection began. “I started to notice them at swap meets and elsewhere.” During the pandemic, Saar painted watercolors of the dolls. She used a saturated palette to capture the mystical figures. —Laura Jacobs