Our position
A figure that is never worked is a sculpture
In 1948 Cy Leonard bought a McElroy. In 1950 it was knocked off a chair and broke into about twenty pieces. Most of the experts who saw it said it was beyond repair.
It was repaired. It survived, and it is still here. Figure makers still tell that story to each other as a warning — the period wood was brittle as glass — and every time they tell it, a few more figures go behind glass and are never touched again.
We think that is the wrong lesson.
A ventriloquial figure kept permanently still is being preserved as a sculpture, not as a ventriloquial figure. The art is in the movement, the timing, and the character. An institution devoted to a performing art that never lets the art perform has preserved the shell of the thing.Jimmy Vee, founder
Some objects genuinely are too fragile to work, and conservation is real. But stillness should be the exception a condition report justifies, not the default nobody questions. A figure’s mechanism is the art. A head that has not moved in forty years has not so much been preserved as retired.
What follows from it
It changes what is worth recording. If the art is in the movement, a catalogue entry listing height and materials has missed the point: what matters is what the figure could do — the mechanisms, who cut them, what they were for. That is why the archive records figures as subjects in their own right, with makers, mechanisms and repair histories, rather than as accessories to the performers who carried them.
What we hold today
The Institute does not hold a collection. This page is a position, not an inventory. If that changes we will say what we hold, where it came from, and on what terms.