Returning to FIT
Black Dolls Matter at FIT: What It Means to Be Included in Doll Dressing
There are moments in a creative life when the distance between where you began and where you are suddenly becomes visible.
For me, this is one of those moments.
This fall, Black Dolls Matter® will be included in Doll Dressing at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Curated by Dr. Colleen Hill, the exhibition brings together more than 170 objects to explore the relationship between dolls, fashion, identity, and the ways we imagine ourselves through what we create.
For Black Dolls Matter®, inclusion in this exhibition is an honor.
For me, as an alumnus of FIT, it carries another meaning.
I am returning to a place that helped teach me how to see.
Before Black Dolls Matter®
Long before there was Black Dolls Matter®, I was learning about fabric, proportion, construction, color, silhouette, and storytelling.
FIT gave language and discipline to instincts that had begun much earlier.
I came from women who made things.
My mother sewed. My grandmother worked with her hands. My great-grandmother was part of that lineage too. Fabric was never simply fabric in my family. It could become clothing, protection, beauty, memory, resourcefulness, and possibility.
At FIT, those inherited ways of knowing entered into conversation with formal design education.
I could not have known then where that education would eventually take me.
My career would lead through costume design, puppetry, television, theater, character building, and work for productions and institutions I could scarcely have imagined as a student.
Eventually, it led me back to the doll.
And the doll led me somewhere else entirely.
Dolls Are Never Just Dolls
One of the ideas at the heart of Doll Dressing is that dolls have long done much more than entertain children.
For centuries, they have carried fashion.
They have communicated ideas.
They have reflected beauty standards, aspiration, fantasy, gender, class, identity, and culture.
Before fashion magazines and social media could transmit a new silhouette around the world, dressed figures helped communicate what people were wearing and what they might wear next.
Later, the relationship reversed. Fashion began borrowing from dolls.
We created them in our image, and then we began imagining ourselves through theirs.
That exchange matters deeply to me because Black Dolls Matter® began with another question about the image reflected back at us: What happens when the child looking at the doll does not see themselves?
That question changed the direction of my life.
It eventually became Black Dolls Matter®.
Who Gets to Be Seen?
When we say representation matters, we are talking about something larger than producing a brown version of an existing object.
We are talking about belonging.
We are talking about the visual language a culture uses to tell people who is beautiful, who is valuable, who is worthy of tenderness, who can be heroic, and who can be imagined into the future.
A doll participates in that language.
That is why I have never been able to think of Black dolls as merely toys.
They are cultural objects.
They carry memory.
They carry aspiration.
They can preserve something about us.
They can challenge something that has been said about us.
And sometimes they can say, very quietly: You belong here.
That is part of what makes seeing Black Dolls Matter® within Doll Dressing so meaningful.
Our work is entering a conversation that stretches back centuries.
And we are bringing something particular to that conversation.
We are bringing us.
From Fashion to Dolls – and Back Again
There is another symmetry in this moment.
My work has always lived somewhere between disciplines.
Fashion taught me about the body.
Costume taught me about character.
Puppetry taught me how an object can appear to breathe.
Television taught me how objects participate in storytelling.
Doll making brought those lessons together.
A doll asks us to consider proportion, textile, construction, character, gesture, history, psychology, and dress at the same time.
That is one reason I believe dolls deserve to be taken seriously as art and design objects.
The clothes carry meaning.
The fabric speaks.
The face – or sometimes the deliberate absence of one – is a choice.
Every decision communicates.
That understanding is also helping shape the next chapter of Black Dolls Matter®.
What We Are Building
I see inclusion in Doll Dressing as evidence that the work we are building belongs to a much larger cultural landscape.
Black Dolls Matter® began with representation, and representation opened the door to something deeper.
We are building around memory, cultural preservation, craftsmanship, storytelling, community, and legacy.
We are exploring the doll as heirloom.
The doll as textile art.
The doll as cultural document.
The doll as an object through which generations can speak to one another.
That thinking is helping us expand into ArtPlush™ and other forms of textile-based artwork that ask where the boundaries between doll, sculpture, fashion, memory, and collectible art actually exist.
Perhaps those boundaries were never as fixed as we imagined.
Doll Dressing makes that question particularly resonant.
If fashion can influence dolls, and dolls can influence fashion, then these objects are part of an ongoing cultural exchange.
Black makers belong in that exchange.
Black designers belong in that exchange.
Black children, Black families, Black collectors, and Black stories belong in that exchange.
They belong fully within the history.
Returning
There is something powerful about returning to an institution that helped educate you, carrying work you could not have imagined making when you first walked through its doors.
The student returns as the maker.
The maker returns carrying the people who taught him to make.
My mother is there.
My grandmother is there.
My great-grandmother is there.
Every person who taught me something about fabric, construction, imagination, perseverance, and care is somewhere in the stitches.
And now Black Dolls Matter® becomes part of a museum exhibition examining the cultural history of dolls and fashion.
I do not take that lightly.
Because institutions help determine what gets remembered.
Museums help determine what objects future generations are encouraged to examine closely.
To place a Black doll within that conversation is to insist that our objects deserve that same attention.
Our craftsmanship deserves study.
Our stories deserve preservation.
Our joy deserves documentation.
And our imaginations belong in the archive.
The Work Ahead
There is still much to build.
Black Dolls Matter® is still becoming.
So am I.
Perhaps that is what makes this moment most meaningful.
The work does not have to be finished before we recognize that something important is happening.
A thread that began generations ago traveled through the hands of the women in my family, through my education at FIT, through costume shops and puppet workshops, through film and television sets, and eventually into the dolls I began making with my own hands.
Now that thread is returning to FIT.
Returning as a maker.
Returning as a cultural voice.
Returning as part of a conversation that belongs to all of us.
And somewhere beyond this exhibition is another generation of makers deciding what they will create, preserve, question, and pass forward.
I hope what we are building tells them something simple:
You can make the object.
You can tell the story.
You can preserve the memory.
You can build what you needed to see.
And one day, perhaps, you may look back and discover that the thing you were building was larger than you understood when you began.
That is what this moment at FIT means to me.
The thread holds.
The work carries forward.
We Were. We Are. We Will Be.™
