Riché Richardson's Art Quilts

The "Cloth Griot": A Message of Deep Thanks to Leanora Mims

2025-10-31T17:43:00.000-07:00

I love the description of Leanora Mims as a “cloth griot.” Her beautiful quilt works speak volumes and are crafted with a level of thought, care, precision and brilliance that make her visual art quilting work stunning, captivating, breathtaking, and deeply moving to encounter. I am so deeply touched, humbled, and tremendously thankful that she designed this stunning art quilt and presented it to me last week over breakfast at Ithaca Bakery, in honor of my appointment as the first woman chair in the history of my department at Cornell, the Africana Studies and Research Center.

As she explained when presenting it, this quilt, whose design and composition are phenomenal, incorporates fabric that mirrors pieces designed for figures such as New York Senator Lea Webb, whom I had the honor of meeting recently, a leader who presented Leanora with an award this year for her community impact during Women’s History Month. It incorporates some fabric pieces whose pattern recollects the artistry of Jean Michel Basquiat, along with African mudcloth and centers the logo of the Africana Studies and Research Center, which also pays tribute to the department’s founding and leading role in establishing and theorizing the discipline of Africana studies. The accompanying essay that she wrote and included with the piece speaks to her process and method as an artist in developing this beautiful quilt (see screenshots on my Facebook quilting site). Like so many of her other works, this quilt richly showcase her genius and gifts from God in this area.

Our department is one to whom she has genuinely been a friend over the years spanning back to her time as a student, one in which she was mentored by a range of faculty, from its founder Dr. James Turner to the Director and Chair under whom I was hired in 2008, Dr. Salah Hassan, a department to whom she so graciously welcomed me. I have so appreciated her support and encouragement of my work as an artist and scholar over the years. I cannot begin to convey the depth of my thanks for her thoughtfulness and vision in designing this piece and sharing it with me, and am truly thankful for her kindness and support.

We plan to display it among in the chair’s office, along with art works currently featured there, including prints by my art mentor Bill Ford and a work highlighting Sr. Thea Bowman, one of the greatest and most impactful influences in my life, a custom cloth doll featuring Sojourner Truth by Renata Gawronski, Gee's Bend quilt throws, and folk art pieces by Chris Clark, Betty Sue Matthews, and Mary Proctor. Leanora’s community art projects and initiatives, including her outstanding work to help educate youth in STEM, have been widely appreciated, admired and applauded, and garnered recognition from the NBA. She is also working on some exciting initiatives with Cornell students, including a project in collaboration with the Johnson Art Museum on campus, which also draw on her talents as an artist, incorporate workshops and expand opportunities for community dialogue, engagement and service. At Africana, Leanora is among our exciting line-up of speakers from the Ithaca community whom we hope and pray to spotlight in a range of dialogues with our faculty scheduled for Women’s History Month. Please stay tuned.

Many blessing to Leanora Erica Mims for thinking of me in producing this extraordinary quilt, and to her beautiful family, for being a shining light and radiating so much love for them in the Lord, and outward to touch the world in so many beautiful, sweet and special ways, while impacting and making a difference in the lives of so many. Thank you, thank you, thank you, dearest Leanora, from the bottom of my heart, and God bless you and your family; I am ever thankful for all of the ways in which you support and encourage my family and me. I look forward to more dialogues continuing forward, truly treasure our friendship, and again, am deeply thankful for your support! Here are some images of us holding her outstanding quilt, as well as photos of the gorgeous mixed-media fabric book that she crafted for me. More photos, including the catalog for the phenomenal exhibition of quilts in Atlanta in honor of Rep. John Lewis signed by some of the artists, and some keepsakes from the landmark Atlanta Quilt Festival in which she participated, are visible on my Facebook quilting site.✝️🙏☮️❤️🖤💚👏👏👏🙌🙌🙌

Comprehensive Digest for My Experimental Memoir Writing in Social Media: The 'Riché Richardson Reality Series' 🙏🏾

2024-01-17T19:37:00.000-08:00

Comprehensive Digest for my experimental memoir writing in social media posted on Facebook, spanning a decade, and in 2022 and 2023, culminating in a "reality series" about my life story focused on memories from my college years with flashbacks to high school, including a yearlong reflection on my life as a college student at Spelman at age 21. The vignettes in the "Riché Richardson Reality Series: Experimental Memoir in Social Media," which total 72,262 words in length,focus on my relationship with my high school boyfriend, "my Crush," and my friendships with my Brotherhood of 3 male friends, all of whom recur as "characters," along with several of my female friends. They are complemented by photo collages and recurrently draw on the body of poetry that I produced as a teen, along with excerpts from my journal, which I first began at age 11 and have maintained since age 15, and now spans 20 volumes. I’m so so thankful to have finally completed this experimental writing series in social media, and feel very blessed to have lived it and for the foundations that it provided on my path in life. I've appreciated the encouragement from the audience and am thankful for the impact that my series of stories made on its readers and followers and for the rich feedback, comments and reflections that they shared along the way, and for their patience as "episodes" were released. Over the years, I’ve also produced an extensive archive of life writing via Facebook in tens of thousands of words that I've written over time totaling several hundred thousand, that will be useful to draw on and build upon for my books and various projects, for which I’m thankful. Hallelujah and all glory to God! #LivingTestimony ✝️🙏🏾❤️☮️🕊🌷

Boyfriend post, June 13, 2013

The Counterfeit, October 5, 2018

Pen Pal, October 8, 2018

#TBTPart1, September 17, 2020

#TBTPart2, September 17, 2020

June 16, 2021

Brotherhood post, July 25, 2021

My Crush, #Part1, September 19, 2021

A Living Testimony, #Part2, September 19, 2021

Part 1 of 3, Before Entering the Real World, February 2, 2022

Part 2 of 3, Gearing Up to Take the Jump Out into the Real World, February 2, 2022

Part 3 of 3, Toxicity I Encountered without Realizing It Entering the Real World, February 2, 2022

College Freshman, June 13, 2022

#TheJam, November 13, 2022

“At age 16. . . “ November 21, 2022

2022 First Social Media “Reality Series” from My Experimental Casual Memoir Writing

Prelude, June 24, 2022

Part 1 of 3: #BlindDate1, June 25, 2022

Part 2 of 3: #FriendsandFun , June 26, 2022

Part 3 of 3: #BlindDate2, June 27, 2022

2023 Final Social Media “Reality Series” from My Experimental Casual Memoir Writing

Introductory Post of the Finale focused on Age 21: December 9, 2022

#Prelude1of2 to 2-Part Post Series Finale, “Entry from my journal written at age 17, on May 31, 1988,” May 16, 2023

#Prelude2of2, May 19, 2023

#BonusPrelude3: "The Midnight Movie That Wasn’t," June 27, 2023

Finale Part 1 of 3:#MemoriesfromAge21, “My Brotherhood and ‘The Law’”(their nickname for me), July 14, 2023

Finale Part 2 of 3 :#MemoriesfromAge21, “Holiday Fun at Age 21,” August 2, 2023

Finale Part 3 of 3, first part: #MemoriesfromAge21, “Back to My Crush, Another Movie That Wasn’t, and Other Experiences from Senior Year of College,” September 25, 2023

Finale Part 3 of 3, second part:#MemoriesfromAge21, “Back to My Crush, Another Movie That Wasn’t, and Other Experiences from Senior Year of College,” October 19, 2023

Epilogue on Series, December 4, 2023

Reflection on Series, December 31, 2023

On Barbie

2023-07-28T20:28:00.010-07:00

In the Barbie toy marketplace, and as someone who has observed its dynamics over the past decade, watched videos and built a mint collection of the ones I was interested in, to complement the ones I still have spanning back to my childhood, I’ve found it interesting and paradoxical that among some white collectors, the most prized Barbies, including for their beauty, are actually the black ones, which are far rarer and have largely been bought up and removed from the public domain. This is a very mystifying market in which the white vintage version of a doll can go for $50 or less while the same black one might be priced at nearly a thousand dollars. In that context, it astonishes me, too, to see an ongoing stream of numerous accessories that can also fetch quite a price as well, whether random clothing items, shoes, combs, or “jewelry,” and all manner of ephemera, which most girls from their time, including all of my Barbie playmates from childhood, would immediately be able to connect to the Barbie doll they originally came from, whether they had ever actually owned that doll or not. You see that hat, and know it came from Western Barbie. Those pink boots, and know it was Fashion Jeans.

The Barbie accessory visual arena is extremely expansive and recognizable down to a hairpin for those most familiar with it, to the point of even being able to name the year it was manufactured! JUST ONE plastic fake rhinestone Barbie “diamond” ring (half the size of a rice grain) is on average worth $25 nowadays, so even Barbie bling is nothing to sneer at. The littlest accessory has high market values, so throwing any of it away can bring regrets like those of folks who let go of GI Joe. Even if she donated other types of toys, my grandmother loved and kept all of our dolls, viewed them as being far more personal and sentimental, and so would never have gotten rid of or given away any belonging to me, my mother, aunt or cousins. The girls I played with in childhood Liletta and Tiffany had mostly black Barbie dolls, and so did I, cherish memories of those times, and are also the product of family and social networks in which girls played with dolls and had playdates revolving around them, as well as activities like Girl Scouts. As I’ve said in the past, Barbie is a thematic anchor in my art studio because sewing, knitting and crocheting clothing for my dolls and furnishings for my doll houses was a vital pathway to art, as well as for conceptualizing and actualizing many dreams in general.

In a culture in which colonialism, imperialism and slavery were the basis, the outcome and consequence will definitely be one in which people of African descent engage in a multiplicity of forms of cultural expression, and love and learn from a variety of cultural resources, just in being and becoming more fully human in a world premised on their oppression and dehumanization. They really don’t need to be bullied about their hairstyle choices and cultural tastes when and if they don’t conform to any and all perceived “black” cultural aesthetics and expectations. In the past, most black people, living in a white-centered and -dominated culture, had to cultivate strategies for finding themselves in and learning from a range of types of music and cultural productions. A world in which black representation and accessibility have thankfully expanded has never foreclosed their ability to do that. I LOVE and have learned some of my most cherished life lessons from films from Grease to Coal Miner’s Daughter, which I first saw in childhood, love The Carpenters, was also a Bon Jovi fan, and still watch The Lawrence Welk Show weekly for its staging and artistry. Joel Osteen’s sermons have ended every Sunday evening for me for the past 20 years, and have been valuable and inspiring for me as well as many black people I know, especially here in the South.

Years ago, given that Mattel reached the manufacturing milestone of producing enough Barbies that could reach to the moon, concerns I’d have are mainly environmental if any owing to the proliferation of plastics on the planet. Many women watch and support male-centered events like the Super Bowl on an annual basis, while NEVER having the reciprocal support in relationships with their husbands and significant others in moments when they are excited about seeing the Oscars or various chic flicks, which can be a signpost of serious selfishness and narcissism. It’s even worse when this still patriarchal and misogynistic culture enables potshots at things that women are enjoying and celebrating. I especially couldn’t care less about what some men have to say about the Barbie fest or what they think, and the cultural critiques ring hollow, too, especially after taking a break from celebrating Marvel’s newest black action films and figures marketed to black boys within a franchise that has also long ignored and excluded black people. I actually find most men who would celebrate and advocate for mutilating or harming Barbie dolls to be as questionable as types potentially capable of forms of animal cruelty and worse. What happens out in the world is one thing, but as for me, the man for me will definitely be the type not only who shares my values, but who supports and encourages what makes me happy, rather than putting down those interests.

It’s about time this film finally came out given generations of girls spanning over 60 years who have played with Barbie, and it has been interesting and inspiring to see highlights from posts of those of all ages who are attending the screenings. I’ve also learned a lot from reading the various articles, including various political issues and cultural responses, which are also interesting as someone who has more casually written about and researched this topic myself. I’m inspired that the public is discovering lessons I learned a few years ago about how much it can help and heal to reconnect to things we once loved as children. At the height of the pandemic, I found that the process of restoring Barbie dolls though hair rerooting was actually one of the best ways to grapple with and reflect on forms of brokenness, as well as lessons on good stewardwardship of one’s dreams and blessings in life. In my domain as an artist and scholar, I’ve been blessed to have the original Superstar Christie, whose going rate on the market since back then has moved to over $1,400, and many others. My dolls are my blessing and my business.🙏🏾❤️

My Barbie Dreamhouse Art Inspiration and Installation

2023-04-30T21:57:00.018-07:00

By Riché Richardson

In the past, I’ve mentioned my favorite toys during early childhood, beginning with the Playskool McDonald’s restaurant. This was the era when the sign at the restaurant in Montgomery, Alabama on Madison Avenue, as I recollect, said “90 million served.” The three-dimensional round sign in the shape of a bucket in front of the Kentucky Fried Chicken nearby also always caught my eye and was another most captivating and interesting image in that area, where trips to the bank and either the Winn Dixie or Big Bear grocery store were often part of my grandparents’ Friday evening routine. Alongside my “McDonald cars,” as I referred to the toy restaurant, I could get lost for hours building and playing with my beloved Puzzle Town, which I set up alongside it, and blended all of it into a world that encamped around the house, from the foot of my grandparents’ bed to the lid of my grandmother’s trunk. Sometimes, I’d take some of the pieces out on the porch. Everything from match boxes to bottle caps to game pegs ended up amidst its accoutrements, which were endlessly captivating to me. I had many other games and toys, but these were my favorites of all, the first of what I think of as “cardboard contraptions” into which I put time and creative energy from my early childhood.

By age 10, the year that I received Golden Dream Christie for Christmas, I began to direct a lot of creative energy into crocheting and sewing clothes for her and dolls that I got thereafter, and building up my dollhouse world, for which I’d make all the bedding and furnishings. My main playmate was my friend Liletta, whom I first met when she was four and I was five, on a night her mom came by, and I took her to see the aforementioned encampment spread across my grandmother’s trunk. We’d play with our Barbie dolls for hours on end, play sessions that always began with us sharing the latest things we’d made for them, and updates on the latest developments in the plots that were unfolding. At first, I improvised a room and closet for my Golden Dream Christie doll with the Golden Dream fashion trunk that I received along with her, and otherwise made do with the Sunshine Family dollhouse that my uncle and his wife, my aunt, had bought me during my early childhood; without the roof, which I could never get to fit on well without leaning, it served the purpose. Like my McDonalds/Puzzle Town in the past, and until I got larger ones like the Barbie Townhouse, my earliest Barbie dollhouses typically migrated from my mom’s bedroom to the dining room, or in brief moments, the floor at the foot of my grandparents’ bed, the preferred spot of younger generations in the house for sitting and TV viewing.

When playing with Liletta, we typically set up in my mom’s room or the dining room, which let in the best and brightest sunlight. Finally, and once I had a room of my own and the Townhouse was put up in there, we played there, just as at her grandparents' house two doors down from her mom and stepfather's house, her Barbie Townhouse dominated the back wall of her room. Like many children of my generation, I loved to look through department store catalogs, and a highlight of the fall was receiving the major catalogs from stores like Wilson’s, Service Merchandise, JC Penny, Montgomery Ward, Sears, Spiegel, and Rich’s; I’d make a beeline to look at their toy sections, just as Liletta and I, as preteens, loved going to the Circus World toy store at Montgomery Mall when we were there with our moms, or to see the unique Dolls of the World Barbie Collection at Pizitz at Eastdale Mall. When looking at the catalogs, I’d also study the bedding ensembles and create my own in miniature form for my dolls, filled with pillows on top of lace-trimmed bedspreads. It also mirrored the beautiful, creamy and lace-trimmed organza floral ensemble that my grandmother would dress up the mahogany bed in the front room with on special occasions, which was a gift from her dear friend Bea from Mobile, who taught school in Elba, Alabama and had visited our family regularly on many weekends for as long as I can remember, at least once monthly during the regular school year, until she passed away in 1980.

My dollhouse was the space where my dreams played out, that space that I could cultivate and decorate just as I pleased, amidst the formal Victorian elegance and beauty that my grandparents nurtured in our home with original period pieces, as well as choice reproductions from the Martha M. House Furniture company nearby, which shipped out fine furnishings all over the world, along with their family heirlooms. As I’ve mentioned, I also made my earliest quilt for my Barbie dolls- a miniature one, which is in a frame and on display in my art studio, whose Barbie theme is registered with a Life Size Black Barbie, and shadow boxes filled with the doll clothes that I made growing up are also on display. It also includes a vertical row of frames featuring some of the soft-sculpture dolls that I made as a child and pre-teen, in keeping with the Cabbage Patch/"adoption doll" craze catalyzed by Xavier Roberts, and a basket filled with two original dolls by him, my own Cabbage Patch doll, and the adoption dolls that our neighbor Essie Thomas made for my cousin Keri and me. My large Barbie doll collection contributes to the more general staging in my home space.

Eventually, to build upon these themes, I also found it interesting to decorate an original Barbie Dreamhouse, which, for my purposes, had to be the one from 1978- the one from my childhood-though its period furnishings are absent here. Instead, half of the rooms were decorated with my original doll house furniture, sofa and chair sets made by Mattel that I’ve had since my preteen years, plus my Barbie Silver 'Vette car and pink convertible Barbie Rolls Royce (which was ordered from the Rich's catalog), Barbie Bubbling Spa and accessories from back then, along with a vintage Suzy Goose hutch that my grandmother bought me when I spotted it at a yard sale back then. (Back then, most of the modern furniture had decorated my smaller dollhouse while furnishings I sewed, knitted and crocheted decorated my Town House). Building upon that theme, I added the vintage Suzy Goose armoire and vanity, along with the Barbie canopy bed from the 1980s, a veritable mainstay of Southern life and the iconic décor for girls’ bedrooms during the seventies. With the Suzy Goose set incorporated in its design, the version of the Barbie Dreamhouse that I decorated rests more in the continuum with my home environment and its antique aesthetics, as opposed to more modern ones. Once I completed the decor, and because of its size and scale, I decided that it would be most interesting to break up and display its three sections in different rooms, from my study to the dining area to my art studio, which I realized recollected the migratory nature of my childhood doll houses, and the ways in which my family so tolerantly and patiently lived with them somewhere in juxtaposition in the space that they continually occupied at home, year in and year out.

In general, I’ve found myself thinking more and more about space as I’ve taught and collaborated with the architect Peter Robinson and met and dialogued with so many of his brilliant colleagues in the field. At the same time, such encounters have made me all the more conscientious and disciplined when it comes to matters of design, as well as more attuned to spatial practices, and matters of design justice, including what they conceptualize as "Blackspace." Always, I found the presence of my dollhouses to be a comfort and something that put me at ease. A part of me sensed that it made my family feel better, too. At age 13, I felt proud when my grandfather, who had been ill for the past few months, walked up to see my Barbie Townhouse once it was assembled, and seemed to approve of its build and design, a major thing given his longstanding work as a contractor in construction, who also constantly worked on projects at home. Years earlier, during the summer when I was nine, he had spent weeks designing and building the enclosure for our dog Dutchess in the backyard, and built her a house that was a miniature of our own, replete with screened windows. When he touched it only to run his finger across the top back of the town house, where the cardboard backdrop was attached, I could tell that the only thing he didn’t like about it was that that piece puckered between the pegs that connected it and didn’t lie flat all the way across.

This Barbie Dreamhouse installation tells a special story and speaks volumes, by reminding me of who I am, who I have been, and where I come from, and holds a lot of symbolic significance in terms of my background and journey as an artist. It is a time capsule from my childhood that continues to inspire me in very different ways as a woman, reminding me yet again of what it means to live our greatest dreams and possibilities in life on the path toward discovering the best versions of ourselves and daring to reach for and become them. Ever so subtly, it complements and punctuates the message of what it means to have a dream as quintessentially amplified in the iconic visage of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., inspiration on my path to the glory of ultimate ones within the heavenly kingdom.

Riché Richardson's Black Vintage Photo Collection

2023-04-08T19:28:00.002-07:00

First of all, Happy Easter, and a blessed Holy week and season full of love and light this spring!

I've long been deeply inspired by the vintage photos in my family history and some of them, including photos such as those of my grandparents Joe Richardson and Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson taken in Florida during the World War II era, have inspired some of my pieces as as art quilter in some cases. When I lived in Davis, California and moved on to Sacramento, I enjoyed visiting their local antique shops, along with ones in Woodland. Several times over my years there, I came across lovely vintage photos of African American couples. They were typically in convex frames that were also beautiful, and I would purchase them whenever I came across them, while feeling deeply saddened that they were in the stores, and vowed that they'd always have a home with me as long as possible. In recent times, it's been exciting to see the publication of Tanzy Ward's book entitled Unsung Portraits: Anonymous Images of Black Victorians and Early 20th Century Ancestors. I'm also a huge fan of the historian and preservationist Michael Henry Adams, who in 2021, toured the Design Justice Workshop on Black memory workers that the architect Peter Robinson and I taught at Cornell around historic apartments, houses, neighborhoods and churches in Harlem, while Michael's brilliant lectures unfolded. His books on Harlem and interior design are outstanding works that I also cherish and purchased copies of to share with my family as well.

At this point, I want to share images of my small Black vintage photo collection and the information that came with them, in case any of their family members can identify them, and any institutions with an interest in this kind of material and research will have the information at their disposal and be able to learn from them.

When I shared them with Tanzy Ward last year in social media, it was heartening that she said the following: "Riché Richardson: awww, thank you for sharing these amazing photos! I truly appreciate the support and interest. It is such an exciting and compelling feeling when antique treasures like this are found. I truly cherish and appreciate your story and shared interest. The historic preservation and care for these precious collectibles are significant and I’m thankful others share the same values"

In all cases, these photos were purchased at antique stores in the Sacramento region during the years that I lived there, 1998-2008. I have deciphered the writing on the back when it has been available, but have included images in case I am misreading any information, and have also included the information from the store labels. As is the case with every purchase for home decor and in the areas of art and design, the original receipts are also all archived in my estate inventory.

Rev. and Mrs. M.H. Beal, Kansas City, Missouri, dated November 12, 1951. So far, I've found a memorial marker for Rev. Beal on Ancestry.com, which lists his birthdate as March 28, 1878, and July 14, 1955 as the date he passed away. It lists B.B. Taylor as his wife, and their wedding date as October 19, 1936. It lists his birthplace as Alma, Arkansas. It would be wonderful to be able to return this lovely and now historic photo to their family, or to any church congregations in Kansas City that they led, to help celebrate their lives and legacies, or any institutions there or in Arkansas invested in preserving such local histories.

This photo is labeled Lawrence S. Larson in Sacramento, California (the photographer?)

This photo is dated 1943 and features a Black couple on wartime break. A number, 350, is also included on the back of this photo, in case that has any significance.

The best chance for making identifications in this instance may be looking at and identifying the buildings in the background.

Riché Richardson's Family History and Black Doll Collections

2023-01-21T16:54:00.010-08:00

Here are the 5 posts from the first part of a summer series from my art quilt page related to the long history of collecting dolls among some of the women in my family, including many black dolls.

Part 1: #BlackDollsandFamilyHistory Several times, my grandmother Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson told me that when they were girls, which was during the twenties, she and her sister Janie Mae Jenkins Reese accidentally discovered the beautiful black dolls that their Aunt Vinnie Jenkins Russell had hidden in a trunk, which they received as Christmas gifts days later. Aunt Vinnie also gave them the tea set of her beloved daughter Amanda, who passed away during childhood in the late 19th century. As a woman in Montgomery, Alabama, she and my grandfather enjoyed buying toys to surprise my mom, uncle and aunt. She also bought lots of dolls for my mom and aunt, black dolls from the store of a Jewish man, she said, as pictured in this photo of my mom and uncle dressed up in cowboy outfits at Christmas. I’ve discussed and the discourse on preferences for white dolls and self hatred so pervasive in black communities, but have a personal story that’s been very different from that, certainly not one in which girls grew up preferring white dolls. My grandmother had a lifelong love for dolls, ensured that the over 125 dolls I had growing up were preserved, and she and my mom continued adding to it, even after I went to college and they became a distant memory. Dolls have also been collected and treasured by several members of our extended family, along with other interesting things. For example, my mom well remembers the beautiful and elegant porcelain doll collection of my grandfather’s Cousin Ludie Meadows on display, dolls dating back to the nineteenth century, a woman who faithfully went to the mass meetings like other relatives of her generation, and who attended the March on Washington in 1963. As a child, my mom took ballet and tap. On Saturday mornings, she would attend Girl Scout activities, and then get together with her cousins Jackie Boswell, Beverly Robinson and others to play with their Barbie dolls. My preteen years were very similar, with either choir rehearsal with the Tender Golden Voices at my Church, Maggie Street Baptist, or Girl Scout meetings. Afterwards, my friend Liletta Nunnery and I always looked forward to going to Godfather’s pizza for lunch for mini combos, or Chuck E. Cheese’s, to the mall with our moms, and would then play with our Barbie dolls. She, her other best friend and Barbie playmate Tiffany Kennedy, with whom the fellowship was very similar, and I have often talked about what blessed times these were. I LOVE the beautiful scene in Beloved when Sethe buys the fabric, lace trims and black doll for her daughters once they are reunited as a family. There is such deep meaning there.

Part 2: #BlackDollsandFamilyHistory When I lived in California, my grandmother Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson reminded me several times that she really wanted me to see the porcelain doll collection of her first cousin Lee Frank Jenkins’s wife Pauline Jenkins at some point. Growing up, I well remembered fellowshipping with them at Aunt Vinnie’s birthday parties, which were always covered in the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper and on WSFA TV News once she turned 100. My grandmother mentioned how beautiful the collection was, that I just had to see it for myself, and that she wanted my cousins Keri and Megan to see it, too. She explained that after a stroke, and as her recovery continued, her cousin’s wife Pauline developed a strong interest in making porcelain dolls. But a local craft’s group in Montgomery with a white women’s membership wouldn’t open it up to her so she could gain the training and access the equipment. So she pulled a move akin to Eunice Johnson’s with European fashion designers and began to build a premium collection of them.  I had built a collection of porcelain dolls myself over the years. But my grandmother could not have prepared me for the evening we stepped into the breathtaking wonderland at our relatives’ home. Their Victorian living room suite, which reminded me of ours, functioned as the main display gallery for most of the porcelain dolls. Some were large-scale and nearly as tall as Megan!  It was all so gorgeous and inspiring to see, full of collector dolls purchased from the major shopping networks with most priced in the hundreds. Several others rooms also had other types of dolls on display, literally going around the wall ledges, from Barbie dolls to beanie babies.  It was dazzling, and a lot to take in. One of the blessings of being part of this family’s Twindynasty from Charleston, SC that we have so far traced back to 1758 has been blessed moments and memories like the ones captured in these photos with this phenomenal collection in all its beauty and splendor.

A reflection on my beloved grandfather Joe Richardson is also part of this #BlackDollsandFamilyHistory series ,so is perfect to mention now as Part 3. In these 2 images, my aunt Pam is pictured with a beautiful black doll she received from my grandparents as a toddler, which was typical of ones they bought for her and my mom throughout their childhoods. As a child, Pam would write my grandfather when he was away on the road doing work as a contractor in construction, and he’d write back. She says that because he brought back such nice gifts, she even preferred him to do school shopping for her as he traveled to find clothes different from ones in stores at home. Around age 10 and in the months before she got on the path to being named May Day Queen at her school, she talks about asking my grandparents for the popular “Swingy” doll. She says that my grandfather patiently explained to her that he was concerned that it might be a bad influence.  She says that he didn’t like the commercial for it, which she’d imitated, and saw it as an example of images in the media that too often either depicted black children dancing or encouraged that sort of thing. He said he could not purchase the doll with his money. Around that time, his jobs had taken him from Atlanta to work on projects for Herman Russell to Orlando to work at Disney World, where he’d bought Pam a plastic Snow White figurine as a keepsake. He told her that he wasn’t buying her the doll for all the reasons he mentioned. Aunt Mae and Uncle Richard gave her and their granddaughter the doll as gifts-the white version available in Montgomery. She’s in very good condition after 50 years, and we still have her, along with some of my aunt’s Barbies from back then. This story typifies my grandfather’s seriousness when it came to critical thinking about media images. He was also one of the earliest critical thinkers about the media from whom I learned.  I have missed my grandfather every day that he has been gone and will ever cherish memories of him. Here’s a link to the commercial in question below:  https://youtu.be/CIhVHVJT7Go

Part 4, #BlackDollsandFamilyHistory At age 12, I adored Michael Jackson like all of my friends. I won first-place prizes in citywide short story and essay competitions in Montgomery. I was busy collaborating with one of my classmates at St. John to draft the book of short stories we hoped to publish by age 15, as we read various literary classics. I was also gearing up to campaign and make speeches in a mock election in our 7th grade class for President of the United States. I had just graduated from my poise-charm class at Gayfers Department Store, and loved being a Jr. Gayfer Girl, which meant receiving store discounts and being recognized with this group at Gayfers’ annual Back-to-School Fashion Show, which highlighted the models on their teen board. My family had lost three of my grandmother’s siblings to cancer, and I had made countless daily hospital and home visits with my grandparents to see and support them from the time I was 9. My grandfather set up scaffolding and spent the summer months painting the living room and dining room, and by the holidays, my family was fully focused on preparations for my Aunt Pam’s wedding, whose colors were red and green in keeping with the season. My role was to be fitted at Gayfers for the tea-length green dress I had to wear as a one of 2 candle lighters in the ceremony, whose role it was to walk down the aisle bearing one of the long torches to help light all the white candles on the gold arch under which the vows would be exchanged. My dress was designed to match the beautiful red bridesmaid evening gowns, and to complement the green dresses of the matrons of honor. I was anxious to get my part just right, and excited to wear the kitten heel shoes, which had been dyed to match my dress. As Christmas got closer and closer, my other major worry was not seeing any boxes under our Christmas tree that looked like they could be Barbie dolls. Day after day, as the presents grew, I spotted not a one.  My cousin and I were told not to touch or go near the tree to arrange anything, but daily, he’d see me slow down, look at it nervously from across the room, and crack up laughing at me and teasing me about “not having any Barbie dolls.” I just couldn’t believe it. But I turned the joke right back on him when he began to sweat it after he did something that irked them and was told by my uncle and aunt that another thing and he wouldn’t get the remote- controlled race car he wanted. The first formal photos for the wedding were taken at home in front of our Christmas tree, gorgeous images of my aunt with each of my grandparents. But my main interest in that tree had to do with what seemed not to be under it. My aunt’s wedding was an elegant formal affair and came off beautifully. The reception had been held in the church’s Fellowship Hall because she wanted no alcohol served at her wedding. Like many young women in the South, she had subscribed to Brides magazine for years and read it on a monthly basis, so every detail reflected her extensive knowledge. My grandparents followed up the wonderful reception, which had a gorgeous wedding cake, as well as a groom’s cake and delicious food buffet, coordinated by 25 hostesses weating beautiful red dresses to complement the bridesmaids, with a smaller family buffet dinner at home. The next day, the dining room was full of the wedding gifts, and the bride and groom arrived to open them in front of our family.  As the pieces of the beautiful China pattern from Gayfers and other lovely gifts were opened and stacked up all around, my mind was still very much on my Barbie dolls. My grandmother was still kind of upset with me because I didn’t change my dress when she asked me to, and a cousin in our extended family in town for the wedding threw a pillow at me while I was holding a glass Coke, which spilled down the front of it the night before. Christmas was just over a week away, and it still looked like I had not a one doll. By that point, I resigned myself and tried my best to accept it.  My cousin and I made a deal that I would tell my mom she should buy him the race car as his gift, and he’d ask his parents to buy me a Barbie doll as mine. That plan gave me a little hope. Day after day went by, and as the presents stacked up, still, not a one looked like it could be a Barbie box. Not even by Christmas Eve!  The next morning, as the family opened gifts, I was determined to try my best to enjoy everything, despite my disappointment.  After opening my first few gifts, including things like a Calligraphy pen set, it was a big shock and surprise to open a box, and within that box, to see a Barbie box!  My mom had boxed and wrapped up all the Barbie dolls in shirt boxes. Just wow!  It was one of the best surprises ever.  My mom really threw me off that year. Pictured here are my Barbie doll collection and 2 doll houses from back then.  I had a fashion doll trunk with lots Barbie clothes manufactured by Mattel, but the process of sewing, knitting and crocheting clothes for my dolls was ongoing for me, and a lot of time went into that process. I also sewed, knitted and crocheted all the bedding ensembles and furnishings to decorate my Barbie townhouse myself, which is pictured here. My friend Liletta had her own similar Barbie dollhouse paradise in her room at home. Always, before our play began, we’d show each other the latest items we’d made and inspect each other’s workmanship.  Here are some photos of my mainly black Barbie doll family and world back then, who by then, were pretend “residents” in Beverly Hills, California.

Part 5 #BlackDollsandFamilyHistory Okay, here's the big one, with 47 photos featuring my full doll "collection," and the second to last post in this series.  Growing up, and from my early childhood, I had a range of dolls of varying types with as many as 115 back then.  Some were damaged and discarded along the way, like my first Baby Alive, whom I at 6 naively fed Play Doh after the food packets ran out.  At every stage of development, I had lots of toys and games growing up, every conceivable thing to intellectually stimulate me, plus microscopes, 2 telescopes, 2 guitars, erector sets, keyboards, and still have a few of my toys, though my dolls were the main toys kept.  A tall Walking Doll from my uncle and aunt, along with a Sunshine Family dollhouse, the Bionic Woman, Superstar Christie Fashion Face and Candi were other types of dolls I received as a child beyond baby dolls.  At age 10, my activities were choirs such as the one at church and the Singing Samaritans at school, along with Girl Scouts.  Playing school and pretending to be a teacher made me happiest, and I was beginning to write songs and poetry, sew and crochet, while trying hard to crack the Rubik’s Cube.  On that, I was competing with my grandfather and Uncle Richard on this latest puzzle, one of many that my grandfather encouraged me to take on, who loved to work Puzzle books in his spare time, and had been proud of how fast I could work puzzles when I was a baby.  That year, my Christmas list included Golden Dream Christie, a trunk and car for her, a Knitting Machine, and a Quiz Whiz, and I received those things, plus a Quiz Whiz Challenger and lots of other toys and games, including various electronic ones.  It was at this juncture that Barbie assumed center stage in my world of play, and an earlier post in this series highlighted images of my 2 Barbie doll houses from back then, along with my Barbie dolls.  At the mall, one of my 2 best friends with whom I mainly played, Liletta, during our preteen years, and I would go to see the latest Barbie dolls at Circus World toy store whenever we were at Montgomery Mall with our moms, and at Eastdale Mall, would go to Pizitz, where we loved to see the Dolls of the World Collection in their toy department.  At age 12, I got an original Cabbage Patch Kid when they came out ,and had already begun to experiment with making miniature types in that genre once my grandparents bought me a Xavier Roberts pattern book from Gayfers at age 11.  At age 14, my Grandmother Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson learned that Mrs. Essie Thomas, one of our neighbors down the street, was making dolls and immediately ordered 2 “adoption dolls” for me from her for $60 each.  Just a year later, and after my cousin Keri was born, my Aunt Pam visited Mrs. Thomas and helped design one for her baby daughter, who was about six months old at the time.  Keri’s first birthday party was held at the Woodmere Clubhouse and had a Cabbage Patch Kids theme, where the full collection was placed.  At age 16, I also bought souvenir dolls on school trips I took back then to Cheha State Park when we climbed Mt. Cheha, and on a trip to New Orleans.  My beloved Grandmother would sometimes surprise me after school as a teen in high school by leaving interesting dolls for me on my bed that she spotted in her shopping forays out with friends, and also began to buy me porcelain dolls from displays at the grocery store.  I kept several black porcelain dolls on display in my dormitory rooms throughout my college years, along with one of the dolls that I had made.  Both she and my mom continued to add dolls to the “collection” long after my interest receded and focus shifted to other things.  My grandmother and her sister loved the black dolls that their Aunt Vinnie bought for them, and my grandmother bought my mother and aunt mostly black dolls as children.  Most of mine were as well, though never all.  I view dolls as time capsules and have been intrigued by their adaptations over history.  I still have the vast majority of the dolls I grew up with and the vast majority that I’ve added over time fall within very specific categories; historical ones like the rag and bisque, a vintage Barbie that my grandmother bought me at a yard sale, dolls from Africa and the Caribbean (mainly from the Bahamas, and I do, incidentally, on my paternal side, have family roots in the Bahamas); porcelain dolls, story dolls, soft sculpture dolls, Barbie dolls, and various miniature and novelty dolls, etc.  Among Barbie dolls, I’m mainly interested in the black "Superstar" collection from the late 1970s on, and types produced up to the mid-1990s, a collection mainly of dolls from my childhood era that the Spirit of the Lord placed it on my heart and led me to fill out just before they were becoming exorbitantly priced for hundreds and more on a market dominated by white collectors and enthusiasts.  I replaced my Superstar Christie Fashion Face and Golden Dream Christie dolls and also collected an original Superstar Christie from 1976, along with various others in the series, added some from the aforementioned Dolls of the World, two original black Little People dolls by Xavier Roberts, and more recently, several Inspiring Women and wedding dolls.  At this point, I have about 171 dolls in all, which are pictured in photo galleries here.  Though many are still boxed and in mint condition, I'm far from being a serious doll collector, but am very casual in it.  I’ve also pictured the 15 dolls that belong to my grandmother, aunt, Keri and Megan.  Dolls are just another interesting visual layer in designing and staging a space focused on showcasing my Southern folk and fine art collections, one that primarily serves as an artist’s home and art studio.  The Barbie theme also works well to invoke in my art studio because knitting and crocheting so many clothing and bedding items for my Barbie and dolls and making miniature soft sculpture dolls as a preteen paved the way to my eventual emergence as a quilt artist.  My doll collection was to me what action figures and race cars were to the boys I grew up with, and once brought me a lot of joy, and so having reminders from childhood in the background here and there is  nice nowadays.  The selected list of dolls from my childhood, as many as whose official names I can remember, is posted in the comments.  I was collaborating on a couple of local public black doll exhibits with other collectors here in Ithaca prior to pandemic, an idea it might be interesting to circle back to at some point.

The comprehensive album of 47 images featuring my doll collection is included on my artist Facebook site: "Riché Richardson’s Mixed-Media Appliqué Art Quilts"

From Riché Richardson’s Mixed-Media Appliqué Art Quilts, May 15, 2023

As my post from a few months ago on “collecting” dolls mentioned, I enjoy the genre of story dolls and have a few, including Addie and rag dolls such as Cassie and Amazing Grace. I initially came across this Black History Month doll depicting Rosa Parks back in the spring of 2020, but didn’t order it at that time, because I wanted to be considerate of postal workers and not add to the demands of a system already stretched to the limit during the shutdowns. I thank the Lord to have finally found it again a couple of months ago. I came across the other one on clearance at Target just a couple of weeks ago. (Those interested should be on the lookout for it)! I enjoyed the process of making my art quilt honoring Rosa Parks that’s now in the permanent collection at the Museum in Montgomery. These plush dolls depict the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement in interesting ways and are also interesting and inspiring to see for their color and design as someone who enjoys working with fabric and seeing some types of black rag dolls and soft sculpture dolls. Happy Mother’s Day, and many and mighty blessings to all mothers!

From Riché Richardson’s Mixed-Media Appliqué Art Quilts, June 27, 2023

I am sooo delighted, blessed, honored, and thankful to have now added the beautiful doll that the Atlanta-based artist Tosh Fomby created as a tribute to the phenomenal Faith Ringgold to my collection of Black cloth dolls, a one-of-a-kind 15” design entitled “Faith Ringgold Cloth Doll”(2023). Look at the remarkable workmanship and play of color, pattern, and texture on duck cloth cotton fabric, with embroidery and the incorporation of mixed media like wire, replete with felt-bottomed shoes! I shared with her that I will treasure it as someone who is myself a mixed- media appliqué Alabama art quilter and longtime collector of Southern folk art; who deeply admires Faith Ringgold; who also loves and has found inspiration in Black soft sculpture dolls, including Mrs. Ringgold’s Cassie, along with Amazing Grace by Grace Aspen; and as someone who, when I was an undergraduate at Spelman, interviewed Dr. Kenneth B. Clark about he and his wife Dr. Mamie Clark’s famous doll experiments, whose tape I pray to archive at some point. Indeed, I found such inspiration in the Cassie and Amazing Grace dolls that, over time, I bought them for display as a set six times(!)-for my office on campus, my study in my apartment/art studio, our family home in Montgomery, as heirloom gifts for the granddaughters in the family of a colleague, for the SIS Oral History Program at Spelman, and as heirloom gifts for my cousin’s granddaughters. As her inspiration, the artist remarks, “Following the career of Faith Ringgold, to honor her accomplishments and legacy in the art world, an African American woman who went against the grain to tell stories of people from the diaspora!” More of her brilliant creations are featured on her website, which is linked in the comments below. Her beautiful doll is such a fine, fitting and truly fantastic tribute to the genius of a legendary and visionary artist. Praise, hallelujahs and all glory to the Lord for this art and all art that inspires!

From Riché Richardson’s Mixed-Media Appliqué Art Quilts, August 25, 2023

Barbie has been a background theme in the staging and design of my art studio because I produced many of my preteen projects in sewing, crocheting and knitting for my Barbie dolls and dollhouses. Back then, and especially after my grandparents bought me a pattern book for producing Xavier Roberts’ Little People dolls from Gayfers Department Store at age 11, another primary inspiration for me became the “adoption doll” phenomenon. I studied the pattern carefully and began to make multiple miniature versions, some of which are in shadow boxes on display in my art studio. Meantime, my grandmother bought black yarn and brown cloth in preparation to have some dolls made for me once she found the right seamstress. My mom photocopied the pattern to preserve the original one from the book and also bought me a Cabbage Patch Kid in the midst of the national craze. Over the next few months, I’d periodically take the folded fabric and yarn out of their bag to survey and assess their rich textures, spend a few moments dreaming of and imagining how the dolls would look, and then put them away again. On a visit to town, a relative in law in our extended family mentioned that she could make the dolls and I happily gave her those precious materials, but she never followed up on that project. A couple of years later, when I was 14, my grandmother learned that our neighbor down the street, Mrs. Essie Thomas, was crafting beautiful “adoption dolls” that sold for $60 each, and took me to her home to pick out the hair and fabric skin for two from among her spectrum of options, which turned out as beautifully as all the dolls she made, including the one for some other neighbors. Months later, my aunt Pam also went down to design and purchase one of the dolls for her baby daughter Keri, who was six months old, and all of them were on display at her Cabbage Patch-themed first birthday party. A few years ago, in light of the soft sculpture doll design elements that inspired me on the path in developing my portrait quilting style, I placed all 3 dolls by Mrs. Thomas, plus my Cabbage Patch, on display in a big basket in my art studio in Ithaca, and also added two original Xavier Roberts dolls, taking pride and finding inspiration in the beauty of Mrs. Thomas’s brilliant and diligent workmanship, including her original canvas shoe designs, alongside dolls that he and his team produced at Babyland General. A couple of weeks ago, I just could not resist adding this third Xavier Roberts “Little People” doll from a 1986 lot called “Southern Belles” for her beautiful design and pristine condition.

From Riché Richardson’s Mixed-Media Appliqué Art Quilts, December 3, 2023, On Celie and Nettie dolls by Renata Gawronski

As someone who has loved soft sculpture dolls since childhood, a genre that paved the way for me to develop my three-dimensional portrait quilting and painting styles an artist, I am always inspired to see interesting work in it, beyond the collection of black rag dolls, story dolls, Little People/“adoption dolls” and African and Caribbean dolls that I have built over the years, to complement my art studio’s dominant themes. Ya’ll, my most recent addition-this tribute to Celie and Nettie as black girls and characters from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple-is so amazing and inspiring to see. The workmanship here is incredibly detailed and truly extraordinary. The painting and layering of colors, sewing and stitching techniques along with embroidery, fabric, lace trimmings and textures, and crocheting in designing the dresses and shoes evoking the early 20th century are a feast for the eyes and senses. The subtleties, like purple shoes for “Celie” and lavender for “Nettie,” with purple purses for both, along with the wrist jewelry and painted nails, are also fascinating and noteworthy. The stitching and sewing techniques are truly pristine. My mom, Joanne Richardson loves these doll designs. My grandmother Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson and her beloved sister Janie Mae Jenkins Reese, who received black dolls from their Aunt Vinnie bought for them at Christmas as girls in the 1920s, would as well. My grandmother ordered two black “adoption dolls” for me when I was 14 and carefully preserved my doll collection for me once I left for college, and Aunt Mae regularly bought creative crafts from her colleagues at John Knox manor and South Haven nursing homes in Montgomery, Alabama as gifts for us. My mom and I saw the original film The Color Purple on the big screen at the movies in Montgomery in 1985 with my friend Liletta and her mom Connie during my freshman year of high school at St. Jude. The film is an all-time favorite in our family and dear to our hearts. Like many black families, we have memorized and can spontaneously talk, think and signify through its script and characters; my grandmother loved it for its motif of two sisters, the same name as one of the Montgomery boutiques where she and Aunt Mae enjoyed shopping. Before he passed away when they were small children, their father Frank Jenkins told her and Aunt Mae to “always stick together,” and they blessedly did, along with their brothers, and were raised with lots of love from their mother Ada and grandfather Adolphus “Doc” Jordan. I learned more about the novel in college, and by graduate school, began to write on it. I saw the Broadway play based on it a few years ago with the journalist Steven Thrasher and one of his friends in New York City. I also love and have learned from Oprah’s story of The Color Purple and find deep inspiration in it. I pray to see the new film adaptation in Montgomery this month with federated club sisters of Dora Beverly, including my mom and Aunt Pam, donning purple. As a part of the programming committee, I have also recommended that we follow up with a group reading and discussion of Salamishah Tillet’s landmark book on Alice Walker and this novel, In Search of The Color Purple, which everyone is ordering; it will enhance this experience all the more. All of this also inspires me given that my newest book project draws on womanist discourses. Again, I want to thank and commend Renata Gawronski for this brilliant and inspiring doll artistry and for the time and love that she poured into this project. Her work has been recognized in “Soft Dolls & Animals" Magazine. She remarks that “My dolls are 100% handmade and carefully crafted without using any glue or paints; soft-sculptured with hand-embroidered faces. I do a lot of detailed work. They are unique and one of the kind, no doll is the same. The hair is made of various yarns and the body is done with high quality cotton or linen, filled with poly fiber. The undergarments are crochet body-suits, or sewn with fabric and lace. Their wardrobe is part crochet and part made of color printed fabric, decorated with beads. They wear headgear and crochet shoes consistent with the fashion of the era they lived in...My dolls are firmly stuffed and sew strongly. They give appearance of a statue. Rather firm to touch.” I thank, praise and glorify the Lord for providing me with such deeply inspiring and beautiful art.

It has been a blessing and inspiration to see so many beautiful dolls from across my family's history and to still have so many of my own spanning back to childhood. They complement my art collecting and practice, and have taught me important lessons on my journey in life, including the importance of cherishing every gift that God provides, and that He is the ultimate Potter and healer of all things broken. All glory and praise to Him for everything.

Photos of Riché Richardson from Facebook Profile

2019-03-28T14:16:00.034-07:00

Clip art from SEEKPNG

In the spring of 2021, in the context of social media on Facebook and within my family and friend community there, I shared a "life album" through a series of decade-by-decade posts over the span of six weeks, highlighting a photo from every year of my life on the path to age 50, and in some cases multiple ones. "Remixes" of my teen years and adult years that I inserted also highlighted photos from the roughly 15 formal events, including teas, balls and cotillions, that necessitated formal dresses and gowns, in which I participated on the path to high school graduation, as well as the various formal events that I have attended throughout my adult life. It was a fun project that took the shape of a virtual "life quilt" that allowed its viewers to see an age progression of my life year by year, from the day I was born, and has inspired some of my new art projects and experiments in the works. There are also pages entitled "The Path" on both my artist and academic websites that draw on different sets of images and highlight various moments across my life history in a similar sense. The images above, including those few that have served as Facebook profile pictures in the past, begin with the photo shoot with Clifford Hunter for my debutante program, as well as an image from the evening of the event itself, and capture various close-ups during moments over the years, from age 17 through the present. Hallelujah and all glory to the Lord for my journey!!! #WalkbyFaith #LivingTestimony #JubileeYear #TheFirst50 #ThePath #LifeJourneyinPhotosYearbyYear #TimeLapseAgeProgressionVirtualQuilt

Christie @ 50 and the Power of Black Doll Love

2018-05-03T07:58:00.003-07:00

By Riché Richardson

Views of my Superstar Christie and Golden Dream Christie fashion doll and styling head collection

The Superstar Christie series on display in my study at home

Superstar Christie on a book shelf

Superstar Christie Fashion Face

Supersize Christie, along with a wooden reproduction of one of my grandmother Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson's photos

Superstar Christie Fashion Face

Golden Dream Christie Fashion Face

Dominique Jones, New York, New York, as a little girl with her Golden Dream Christie Fashion Face on her birthday

Screenshot of Ebay auction this year pricing Superstar Christie at nearly $900

A Polaroid photo of my Barbie doll collection and Barbie Townhouse as a preteen.

My mother Joanne Richardson pictured with my Uncle Joseph and her doll on Christmas Day in Montgomery, Alabama in the late 1950s

My Aunt Pamela as a toddler on Christmas Day in Montgomery, Alabama with her doll in the early 1960s

“Your hair. It’s gorgeous.” “Reminds me of this Christie doll head I had when I was a little girl.” These were my words to another black woman sitting across from me at the drying station at the Le Nails nail salon in Ithaca, New York one Saturday a few years ago, as I noticed her healthy-looking, thick, full-bodied, barrel-curled dark brown hair, which was highlighted with patches of gold, though in her look and mannerisms, she had also reminded me a lot of one of my teachers. My description of my cousin Megan’s hair in the weeks before her debutante cotillion in 2006, when I told her that “You have that ‘Christie doll hair,’” had been similar.

She thanked me for the compliment and then said, decisively, “I had that doll, too.” She began to tell me a fascinating story about how determined she was to recreate its hair’s sunstreaked look. She described how long she had searched for just the right color. Her search for the perfect gold sounded like a veritable treasure hunt, which had, amazingly enough, even led her all the way to Germany, where she finally found the color that satisfied her at last. She then told me the name of it, though I knew even then as I admired her look that coloring my hair was not something that I’d likely try myself. It sounded as if it had to be in her own “Goldilocks Zone,” in the sense of being “not too light” and “not too dark,” to borrow the lingo linked to distant planets thought to be places that could sustain life someday because of their earth-like characteristics such as possibly having liquid water and not being too close or too far away from the sun in their solar system, but “juusst right.”

It amazed me that something as simple as our mutual memories of the same Christie doll head from our childhood had sparked such a rich dialogue and connection for us as black women in a public space where it would have been easy to remain silent strangers to each other as we sat facing each other for those few minutes. It’s also one of the moments in recent years that led me to reflect increasingly on Christie’s cultural impact, as well as her personal impact on me. More and more, I was inspired to reclaim her.

The truth is that like the two of us, there are lots of black women of our generation who were children during the late 1970s as Christie culminated her first decade and took on “superstar” dimensions in Mattel’s landmark series launched in 1977, which featured her with signature sunstreaked hair during that era. The glamorous Superstar Christie series, which made its debut alongside Superstar Barbie, is what most girls around my age best remember. And of course, there are those who were at the vanguard among the first wave of black girls who actually witnessed the introduction of Christie (O’Neil) as a friend of Barbie in 1968. This was a year marked by the tragic deaths of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy, when the Black Power movement was increasingly impacting the nation and slogans such as “Black is Beautiful” that reflected black pride were vocal. It is also noteworthy that Christie integrated the world of Barbie toward the end of the latter iconic doll’s first decade and the year before Diahann Carroll made her debut in Julia, the first television sitcom featuring a black woman.

M. G. Lord’s Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll quotes the journalist and doll collector Susan Howard as saying, “When you’re a kid who basically has no one to play with other than yourself and a few friends, this doll becomes your friend.” “You don’t know how much it meant to me that Barbie had a friend like Christie. Because that meant, well, Barbie likes black people. And it may sound silly, but it was important for me to know that Barbie liked someone like me.” That 2018 marks Christie’s 50th birthday is a monumental milestone. I want to take a moment to pause and reflect on what she means to me, along with others who truly understand how special she is, especially black women everywhere who love (and in some cases, still collect!) black dolls and who played with her as children.

I was introduced to Christie by receiving Superstar Christie Fashion Face, with her signature hard yellow plastic tray base and blue combing accessories, when I was seven on Christmas day in 1978. Among my toys, the dolls that I received were this one alongside four baby dolls, including Dancerella, Baby Come Back and Baby-That-Away. But this Christie styling head was my first fashion doll, which had accessories like makeup, sunglasses, barrettes and hair rollers. I had also received Fashion Plates, a drawing and design kit. She stayed in the box for the first couple of years because she was still a little over my head.

However, I find it intriguing that the year of her arrival in my life was really the earliest time that I began to think seriously about what I wanted to be when I grew up, who I wanted to marry and to picture what I might grow up to look like someday as a woman. The image of myself as a woman solidly crystallized in my mind at age seven, likely an amalgam of beauty posters and ads featuring black women that I’d seen in the beauty shop. It’s interesting that a sense of being “fierce” in a way that only the signature stare from Vanessa Williams in Ugly Betty can capture, was a top quality, suggesting my goal to become a confident, no-nonsense woman someday. It was also the first year that I began to dream about what I wanted for my life and family (of origin and by marriage) in the future. Superstar Christie, like my later doll in the Golden Dream Christie series, lived in Malibu, California. I suppose, in some unconscious way, they helped pave the way to California for me, which is where I got my first teaching job as a university professor and lived for a decade, from ages 27-36.

As Erica Rand notes in Barbie’s Queer Accessories (1995), girls rarely play with Barbie in the way that Mattel models and prescribes. As a girl, I’d rename the sisters in my doll family-the Golds who were from Orlando, Florida- in every linguistic variation of Christie I could think of. Their names were “Christen”(Golden Dream Christie), “Christiane”(Peaches and Cream Barbie), “Crystal”(Crystal Barbie), and “Christine”(Day to Night Barbie) My main Barbie playmate approached her naming strategy similarly. One of hers was named “Christina”(Pink and Pretty Christie). Similarly, I renamed my first black Ken “Kent”(Sunsational Malibu Ken).

The doll experiments by Dr. Kenneth B. Clark and his wife Dr. Mamie Clark famously impacted the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 illustrating the detrimental impact of segregated schools on black children who identified with and preferred white dolls and thought only they were pretty. Still, there have always been black girls who embraced, played with and loved black dolls. My mother Joanne Richardson bought mostly black dolls for me, just as my grandmother Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson had for her and my aunt Pamela during the 1950s and ‘60s (pictured above). (The earliest Barbies I saw in life were Pam’s). Indeed, my grandmother's Aunt Vinnie had bought black dolls for her and her sister Janie Mae as gifts for Christmas during the 1920s. It is a testament to how valued Christie continues to be that she is now so coveted by collectors and so rare, especially the Superstar Christie series. For example, it is astonishing that the pricing for Superstar Christie was listed in some auctions in recent months at selling prices ranging from $449-$875.

My grandmother never allowed me to take any toys to school because “You go to school to learn, not to play.” Yet, as an adult, I have found that some toys in my office space connect me to my past in ways that inspire and nurture me. In my office on campus at Cornell University, I display storybook dolls such as Cassie, Amazing Grace and a black Raggedy Ann, along with dolls that thematically link to courses I’ve taught in recent times, such as the Hasbro (2001) and Mattel (2005) collections of Destiny’s Child dolls, which I researched for my Beyoncé Nation course, and Mattel’s tribute to Misty Copeland, whose autobiography my students and I read last fall in my course on Black Women’s Autobiography in the 21st Century, the 2017 Rabinor Seminar in American Studies. However, my study at home, which includes another Cassie doll and a black Raggedy Ann and Andy, showcases the various dolls in the Superstar Christie collection from the late '70s. I spent last year rebuilding it by doing painstaking searches for mint versions of the main dolls from my childhood, which are incredibly rare now, and finding them was a great blessing. I decorate my closet with the Golden Dream Christie doll series, along with one of my prized possessions that I have had since my first year of college, the poster of Iman, Beverly Johnson and Louise Vyent from Revlon’s Unforgettable campaign.

In my home space, my Christie dolls, and especially the tall Supersize Christie atop one of my art book shelves, have a sculptural quality that speaks profoundly to the artist in me, along with the woman as one who stands at 6’2” tall myself and who has so frequently been asked the “Are you a model?” and “Do you play basketball?” questions so familiar to many tall girls. While Superstar Christie Fashion Face, with her rooted eyelashes, seemed larger than life to me in childhood and looks much smaller through my adult eyes, she seems as mannequin-like as the elegant black wig mannequins at my beauty shop. The Superstar Christie dolls are another interesting thematic thread in my artist’s apartment and studio that I have cultivated over the years as a mixed-media appliqué quilt artist who also collects Southern folk art with an emphasis on Alabama. In building this theme, I have found my greatest inspiration in the Paris apartment designs of Claudia Strasser for supermodel Kirsty Hume in the Paris Apartment: Romantic Décor on a Flea Market Budget, which incorporate Barbie dolls, and in the apartment of Bjørn Amelan, the partner of famed black designer Patrick Kelly shown in Paris Interiors. Kelly, who was originally from Mississippi, had highlighted and decorated their apartment with various vintage black dolls.

My Superstar Christie Fashion Face fills my heart with memories of myself as a little girl at age seven sitting under the Christmas tree in 1978 surrounded by my family, taking me back to that special time at home again that I will also always carry in my heart. On her birthday this past January, Dominique Jones, Executive Director at The Boys and Girls Club in Harlem, posted a photo of herself as a little girl with her Golden Dream Christie Fashion Face on her Facebook page, which features her doll and her birthday cake (see above). One of her black women friends posted a picture in the comment box featuring herself as a little girl standing by her vintage Christie styling head. These adorable and sweet photos suggest what a cherished doll Christie was by some black girls, and how intricately she has been linked to some of their most special childhood memories and celebrations.

While Christie had been prominently featured as a companion doll to the new Barbie designs throughout the 1970s and into the early ‘80s, “Black Barbie” officially debuted in 1980. In 1984, Mattel launched its “We Girls Can Do Anything” campaign, words that rang out as an empowerment anthem in commercials as the company introduced dolls depicting Barbie as a businesswoman and in various other careers. As important as this message was, in some ways, Christie also helped instill such lessons in many of us, and inspired us to reach within ourselves, to aim to become our best, and to tap our "superstar" within. Christie was the toy with which I primarily identified and, like Barbie, linked to messages of empowerment. In my life, my grandmother has played a central role in teaching me to be confident, to love myself and to always aim to achieve my greatest possibilities in life. She taught me not to worry myself over what other people think about me, and to always walk by faith and focus on my goals. When we talked every morning during my years in California, her daily sendoff for me, besides "I love you," was always, "Hold up your head and strut."

In spite of her impact, Christie still had some clear limitations. Though she was a groundbreaking creation and Christie had dark brown skin, her features were typically cast from the “Steffie mold” used to make Barbie and many of her friends, mirroring Eurocentric aesthetics. In Skin Trade (1996), Ann DuCille describes the raced and gendered essentialisms related to the body and facial features that efforts to create ethnic Barbies inevitably re inscribe. It would have been great if Mattel had re-released Superstar Christie alongside Superstar Barbie on Barbie’s 50th birthday in 2009. Because Christie still matters to and inspires so many of us, and especially who were children during her superstar era, it would have been nice to see this series modernized for the millennium and introduced to new generations of girls, including black girls. In all of this, I also wonder why we still have not seen the logical outgrowth of this doll dynasty given her national and global impact: Superstar Beyoncé.

Through the years, Mattel has reinforced and expanded its messages of empowerment and in recent times, released dolls honoring a multiplicity of extraordinary women, including Gabby Douglas, Ava DuVernay, Oprah Winfrey, and Katherine Johnson, among others. Such efforts make an important contribution and help to make a difference. A half century later, it is clear that Christie’s groundbreaking legacy at Mattel helped pave the way toward a broader and increasingly more diverse and dynamic repertoire of black and other ethnic dolls.

*****
For more dialogue on black dolls, see my post on this blog from November 7, 2016,"®Made in Montgomery: Growing Up with Dolls and Honoring the Craft Work of Mrs. Essie Thomas": http://richerichardsonartquilts.blogspot.com/2016/11/made-in-montgomery-growing-up-with.html

While I am talking about Superstar Christie , I also wanted to mention the latest fashion doll styling head, which was released by Mattel this year: the black "Barbie Deluxe Styling Head - Color & Style Deluxe Curly Hair." I think that it is a beautifully designed and gorgeous doll that is also special for how it celebrates natural black hair. It is a Barbie but has the look of Superstar Christie and beautifully updates and revamps her for our time in the 21st century, replete with hands for manicure. This latest black Barbie styling head doll by Mattel, with all of her wonderful accessories, would be a great toy to purchase for girls to play with right now and so I highly recommend her:

The Portraits Quilt Exhibition Gallery

2018-02-02T20:48:00.002-08:00

Portraits II: From Montgomery to Paris: The Appliqué Art Quilts of
By Riché Deianne Richardson (2015)

Exhibition Dedicated to Mr. Joe Richardson and Mrs. Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson

By Riché Richardson

Curator: Daniel Neil with Georgette Norman

Early Work: A Retrospective and Prelude to “Portraits”

Includes Delta Quilt Series, Daughters of Africa Series, Family Quilt, Autobiography Quilt, and Africa Quilt Series (10 works)

Soft-sculpture doll honoring purple uniform of Alabama Association of Federated Youth Clubs completed at age 16. Second place prize winner at annual state convention. Eyes painted on by Dorothy Thomas, a neighbor who made and sold soft-sculpture dolls (1987).

Soft-sculpture doll made at age 18 to decorate dormitory room in Packard Hall at Spelman College freshman year the summer before leaving for college(1989)

“Delta Love.” First art quilt produced in 1992 as a new member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., in Spelman College’s Eta Kappa Chapter; this organization also first exhibited Riché Richardson’s art when featuring this piece in an exhibition on Spelman’s campus in 1993. This Delta art quilt also includes two small replicas in the collections of the artist’s Delta “Speshes,” Soror Patsy K. Rucker Mccray and Soror Riché Daniel Barnes

“My Family Quilt”(1993)

“Destiny’s Child: Borrowed Robes: The Autobiography of Riché Richardson”(1994)

“Daughters of Africa.” From the Collection of Claire Milligan(1993). Large, multi-panel art quilt on which this series is based was completed in the summer of 1993.

“Daughters of Africa.” Appliqué work by Riché Richardson and quilting by Georgette Norman.
From the Collection of Georgette Norman (1993).

Africa Quilt (1995)

Africa Quilt (1995)

“JoAnn Richardson: School Days.” First painted art quilt that launched the “Portraits” art quilt project (1999)

*A quilted “Daughters of Africa” potholder and a Christmas stocking featuring a Christmas tree and snowman were also produced during the mid-1990s phase, though no art quilts were produced between 1996 and 1998

(Images Unavailable)

From Portraits II Family Series, Including Baby and Children, Education, Debutante and Self-Portrait Series, Along with
Various Installation-Style Works with Light and Sound Technology Components (29 Works)

“Debutante Daddy: Mr. Joe Richardson Presenting Daughter Pamela Richardson As a Debutante in National Sorority of Phi Delta Kappa, Inc., Beta Beta Chapter Cotillion, Garrett Coliseum, Montgomery, Alabama, April 10, 1976” (Joe Richardson, b. July 11, 1915 and Commemorating 100 Years in 2015) (Debutante Series). Installation-style panel 1 of 3. Composition 2011-2014.

“Debutante Pamela Richardson Presented by Father, Mr. Joe Richardson, in National Sorority of Phi Delta Kappa, Inc., Beta Beta Chapter Cotillion, Garrett Coliseum, Montgomery, Alabama, April 10, 1976” (Debutante Series). Installation-style panel 2 of 3. Composition 2011-2014.

“Debutante Mama: Mrs. Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson, Mother of Pamela Richardson in National Sorority of Phi Delta Kappa Debutante Cotillion, Garrett Coliseum, Montgomery, Alabama, April 10, 1976” (Debutante Series). Installation-style panel 3 of 3. Composition 2011-2014.

The Montgomery Advertiser newspaper showcased debutantes from the April 10, 1976 cotillion at Montgomery, Alabama's Garrett Coliseum highlighted here in a two-part feature published on April 15 and April 22, 1976. An 11X14 reproduction of the part of the news feature published on April 22 that features Pamela Richardson in one of its two photographic sections is positioned on the wall left of panel 1.

Top hat, white-tipped cane, white pedestal column and white floral bouquet positioned at left adjacent to panel 1. A segment from the original newspaper article related to the cotillion positioned right of panel 3. Special thanks to Pamela R. Garrett for developing the flower bouquet designs and to Kim Salter at Evening Out Formal Wear in Montgomery, Alabama for providing the cane featured in the installation.

The main song in the digital soundtrack component of this debutante quilt installation is Barbara Streisand’s “The Way We Were”(1976), the theme song of the cotillion. Among other songs in rotation are Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely,” The Carpenters’ “Close to You” and “We’ve Only Just Begun,” Fred Astaire’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together,” Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Shining Star” and The Chordettes’ “Mr. Sandman.”

The installation also includes one-light spotlight beam technology shining on center panel. Special thanks to Daniel Neil for collaborating on sound and light technology features of this art quilt installation.

“Jo Ann and ‘Junior Man’ II, or, ‘Butler’ and ‘Jenny’: Cowboys at Christmas.” Installation-style quilt. Special Thanks to T-Shirt Express for Screen Printing Background Photographs. Dedicated to Nancy Hodge Richardson, Murray Richardson, and Sarah and Clinton Carson. Special thanks to Joanne Richardson for preparing the fringe on the outfits in this art quilt installation. Composition 2009-2015.

“Pam as Booker T. Washington May Day Queen.” Original newspaper article related to the festivities is positioned on the wall. Composition 2009-2014.

“Riché Deianne Richardson as Jr. Gayfer Girl in 1983 at Age 11 and Dressed for the Group Photo, the First Event after Graduation from Poise-Charm Classes at Gayfers Department Store (formerly Montgomery Fair) in Montgomery Mall"(Family Series, Education Series, and Self-Portrait Series). Special Thanks to T-Shirt Express for the T-Shirt Design and Production.
Composition 2012-13.

“’Head and Shoulders Knees and Toes!’: Keri Diamond Smith and Megan Chereé Smith, School Days at St. John-Resurrection"(Family Series, Education Series) Installation-style quilt. Also features sound of children’s song “Head and Shoulders Knees and Toes.” Special thanks to Daniel Neil for collaborating on sound technology features of this art quilt installation. Composition 2005-12.

“Riché Deianne Richardson: Profile in the State of Alabama” (Self-Portrait). Composition 2011-2014.

Political Series

“Obama Time: Always (Congratulations, Mr. President!)” (Political Series). Composition 2008-09.

“The Magnificent Michelle Obama, Our First Lady: ‘Strength and Honor are Her Clothing’(Proverbs 31: 25)”(Political Series). Composition 2009.

“Mary McLeod Bethune: One of America’s Greatest Sweethearts and the World’s Best Leaders.” Composition 2012-2014.

"Clarence Thomas’s High Tech Lynching?: Inferior Court Justice to Be"(Political Series). Composition 2002-12.

"Condoleezza Rice: From Birmingham to the White House" (Alabama Women Series, Political Series). Composition 2011- 2012.

“The Journey of Condoleezza Rice.” Composition 2012.

“’W’: President George W. Bush, #43.” Composition 2013-14.

Civil Rights Movement: The Montgomery Bus Boycott Series

“Rosa Parks, Whose ‘No’ in 1955 Launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Was Heard Around the World”(Commemorating 100 Years, 1913-2013) (Civil Rights Movement Series, Black History Series, and Alabama Women Series). Dedicated to Georgette Norman. Composition 2006-12.

“Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: From the Montgomery Bus Boycott to a Dream for America” (Black History Series). Composition 2012-2014.

“E.D. Nixon: Father of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Civil Rights Movement” (Black History Series) In Memory of E.D. Nixon, Jr., a.k.a. “Nick LaTour.” Dedicated to Alma Burton Johnson. Composition 2012-13.

Riché Richardson's art quilt honoring Rosa Parks on public display in the building's lobby as part of the permanent collection at the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama

Paris Series

“James Baldwin: From Harlem to Paris” (African American Literature Series). Composition 2012-2014.

“’Richard Wright: From Mississippi to Paris” (African American Literature Series). Composition 2012-2014.

“Audrey Tautou as Amélie.” Composition 2011.

Hollywood Series

“Charleston's Finest: Clark Gable as Rhett Butler"(Gone with the Wind Series). Special thanks to Daniel Neil for collaborating on sound technology features of this art quilt installation. (Panel 3 of 3). Composition 2006-12.

“Dorothy Dandridge Playing Carmen Jones” Installation-style quilt. Special thanks to Daniel Neil for collaborating on sound technology features of this art quilt installation. Composition 2012-2014.

“I Wanted to Really Build Something: To Sidney Poitier with Love.” Composition 2012-2014.

“The Marvelous Marilyn Monroe.” Installation-style quilt. Special thanks to Daniel Neil for collaborating on sound technology features of this art quilt installation. Composition 2011 -2014.

Black History Series

“Daughter of Africa, Mother of African American Literature, Another American Revolution” (Black History Series, African American Literature Series, and New Daughters of Africa Series). Dedicated to Honorée Jeffers. Composition 2010-12.

“The Great Abolitionist Frederick Douglass: ‘I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday’; Birthday Unknown but Celebrated February 14” (Black History Series) Dedicated to Class of 2009, Suger High School, Saint-Denis in Paris, France. Installation-style quilt. Includes display of a broken cowhide whip. Composition 2010-11.

“Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison”(African American Literature Series). Composition 2010.

“The Vision of W.E.B. Du Bois.” Composition 2012-2014.

Portraits from Montgomery to Paris(2008) (19 Works)

From Family Series, Including Wedding, Graduation/Education, and Debutante Series, Three Installations, and Artist Self Portraits

"Sunday Afternoon on Palafox Street in Pensacola, Florida during WWII: Emma Lou
Jenkins Richardson.” Composition 1999-00.

“Sunday Afternoon on Palafox Street in Pensacola, Florida during WWII: Joe Richardson.” Composition 2000-01.

"JoAnn and 'Junior Man': Easter Sunday, Montgomery, Alabama, 1954"(Installation). Composition 2001-04.

"Pam's Graduation from Kindergarten at Mrs. Drake's"(Installation). Composition 2005-08.

"JoAnn Richardson: Graduation Picture at Booker Washington High School." Composition 2005-06.

"Joseph Richardson: Graduation Picture at Booker Washington High School.” Composition 2006-07

"Pamela Richardson: Graduation Picture at Jefferson Davis High School." Composition 2005-08.

"The Honeymooners: Celebrating 47 Years: Emma Richardson." Composition 2005-06.

"The Honeymooners: Celebrating 47 Years: Joe Richardson." Composition 2005-08.

“Riché Deianne Richardson: Graduation Picture at St. Jude Educational Institute of 'The City of St. Jude.”' (The Last Camping Place for Selma-to-Montgomery Marchers in 1965) (Self-Portrait). Special Thanks to Dr. Kelly Gianetti for Sterilized Orthodontic Appliances. Composition 2005-06.

“Riché Deianne Richardson, Age 17: Debutante Cotillion Program Portrait, 1989." (Self-Portrait). Composition 2006-08.

"Keri Diamond Smith, Age 17: Debutante Cotillion Program Portrait, 2004." Composition 2006-08.

"Megan Chereé Smith, Age 17: Debutante Cotillion Program Portrait, 2006." Composition 2006-08.

From Paris Series

"Playing Venus Hot to Trot?: Josephine Baker"(Commemorating 100 years, 1906-2006). Composition 2001-05.

"Remembering a Dutiful Daughter: Simone de Beauvoir" (Commemorating 100 years, 1908-2008). Composition 2004-07.

From Political Series

"The Ties that Bind: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy." Composition 2002-04.

"A Tie, Too?": Malcolm X." Composition 2002-04.

From Hollywood Series

"Playing 'Mammy': Not Hattie McDaniel!" Composition 2006-08.

"Sweet Scarlett?: Vivien Leigh Playing Southern Belle." Composition 2006-08.

Pamela R. Garrett posing with the quilt featuring her as May Day Queen at Booker T. Washington Elementary

Pamela R. Garrett posing with the Debutante Triple Quilt installation featuring her and her parents

Pamela R. Garrett adjusting the panel of her father Joe Richardson on the Debutante Triple Quilt Installation

Members of the Montgomery Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. (MAC) at the public reception for "Portraits" on January 15, 2015

The artist Riché Richardson talking to Dr. Henry Johnson at public reception for portraits (photo by Ora Patterson)

Some family members in the gallery room after the "Portraits" public reception

"Portraits" exhibition curator Georgette Norman, Founding Director of Rosa Parks Museum

Images by Mickey Welsh from the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper of the gala Hyundai Reception commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march held on March 6, 2015 at Rosa Parks Museum, which was hosted in the gallery room with "Portraits" and included local and national leaders such as Montgomery Mayor Todd Strange, Tuskegee Mayor Johnny Ford, noted civil rights attorney Fred Gray, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Bernice King, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, among many other distinguished leaders.

®Made in Montgomery: Growing Up with Dolls and Honoring the Craft Work of Mrs. Essie Thomas

2016-11-07T12:56:00.000-08:00

Dancerella, a ballerina doll I got at age 7

Baby Come Back, a doll that could walk I got at age 7

My Barbie doll collection and Barbie Townhouse as a preteen. From floor to floor, I furnished it myself with bedding ensembles, pillows, sofas, chairs and miniature soft-sculpture dolls and a teddy bear that I sewed or crocheted and stretched around small boxes, with the exception of the blue and white bedspread on the top left floor, which is a dish towel.

My Soft-Sculpture "Adoption Dolls" Designed and Created by Our Neighbor Mrs. Essie Thomas, Made in 1986, which my grandmother Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson ordered for me

The "Adoption Doll" that my grandmother Emma and my aunt Pam ordered from Mrs. Thomas for my cousin Keri Smith when she was a baby in 1986. My aunt wanted the doll dressed in the colors of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc, for she was a Delta. Now, Keri, her sister Megan and I are, too.

The "Adoption Dolls" by Mrs. Essie Thomas that my grandmother bought me as a teen, my Cabbage Patch Kid from my mom at age 12, two original "Little People" Dolls by Xavier Roberts, plus Keri's, soft-sculpture doll designs that put me on the path to becoming an art quilter

The pattern book on Xavier Roberts's soft-sculpture "Little People" dolls that my grandparents Joe and Emma Richardson bought me at Gayfers Department Store in Montgomery, Alabama when I was 11, which I studied, and is how I became interested in making dolls. This is the foundation upon which I developed my interest in quilting

The soft-sculpture doll that I made at age 15 in 1987 for the Alabama Association of Federated Youth Clubs talent competition, that Mrs. Essie Thomas painted the facial features on

The soft sculpture dolls I made at ages 15 and 18, along with one of my first quilts in the Daughters of Africa Series.

My Cuddle Wit rag doll from my grandmother Emma, along with two 1930s bisque and rag dolls that I purchased from Audrey Hastings at Hastings Back Porch in Davis, California. They were the two black dolls that came to her from a senior white woman's large doll collection. I keep them together as a reminder of this woman's special story.

My Porcelain Doll Collection

My aunt Pam's friend Yvonne brought me the straw dolls from the Bahamas as a child. My godmother Virginia Anne sent me the larger of the South African dolls. I bought the Native American doll on a trip to Cheha State Park at age 16. The others, from Trinidad, South Africa, Senegal, and China, have been added to my collection over the years

My cousin Keri's Barbie doll dressed in African attire, along with a basket of my own Barbies on display in my apartment.

My "storybook dolls" at home include a small Addy Walker doll by American Girl in my art studio, along with black Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls and Faith Ringgold's Cassie doll in my study

The porcelain doll kneeling in prayer on my nightstand, and the rag doll made by a Sacramento artist in the kitchen

My Superstar Christie and Golden Dream Christie doll collections

Superstar Christie doll collection on display among the books in my study

Golden Dream Christie doll collection on display in my bedroom closet, along with a Barbie Color & Style Deluxe Styling Head, among others

The Destiny's Child doll collections on display in my office that I researched while teaching my Beyoncé Nation course, along with the "Storybook dolls" Cassie, Amazing Grace and a black Raggedy Ann

My grandmother's cousin Lee Frank Jenkins's wife Pauline Jenkins's porcelain doll collection in the late 1990s

Pauline, Megan and Me with Pauline's doll collection

Me with Pauline's porcelain doll collection

My cousin Megan with Pauline's porcelain doll collection. Some of the dolls were literally as tall as she was!

I have loved dolls since my childhood. Though I have seen myself with dolls in pictures from my toddler and early childhood years, Baby Alive was the first doll that I remember playing with. However, my time with her was cut short when I naively fed her Play Doh once her packaged food supply ran out and her chewing mouth mechanism ceased to ever move or work again. My uncle and his wife bought black "life-size" walking dolls with blinking eyes and long floor-length dresses for my cousin and me the year when I was 6, my next major gift from them after the Sunshine Family Dollhouse the year before. The Bionic Woman was my other doll for Christmas that year, one I enjoyed for all of her accessories. I took her little red shoulder bag to school as a change purse one day, though not the doll itself. I was forbidden by my grandmother to take toys to school because "You go to school to learn, not to play."

Among all my toys and games, I received 4 baby dolls for Christmas in 1978 when I was 7 and in second grade. They included a black ballet dancing doll, Dancerella(see photo above), Baby-That –Away, who could crawl, and Baby Come Back(see photo above), who could walk, along with another one whose name and function I can’t recall. We got busy putting the batteries in all of them to see what they could do. We even got my aunt's walking doll Swingy that Uncle Richard and Aunt Mae had bought her as a child out of the closet, put batteries in her and put her down beside Baby Come Back for a little walking competition that the whole family watched and enjoyed for a few minutes, which was fun. I also liked the Fashion Plates and the Christie Fashion Face doll (pictured above), but did not open it or play with the latter for several years because it was still a bit over my head with all of the makeup and hairstyling accessories that came with it. In spite of the Play Doh debacle with Baby Alive, it was also great to have Fuzzy Pumper Barber and Beauty Shop among my other toys and games that year.

The next year, for Christmas when I was 8 and in third grade, I received several more dolls among my toys and games. I remember that Happy Baby was a big hit in my family and it was fun to demonstrate her laughter as she was bounced. There was also a doll with a stroller that was fun to play with by pulling a mechanism and seeing her zoom across the floor, and my family enjoyed watching her go, too. My Play Doh supply continued to go strong that year with Dr. Drill ‘N Fill. The baby doll collection continued to expand some as time went on, and eventually included another Baby Alive, who was black this second time around.

By the time I was 10, I became interested in Barbie dolls. I asked for 5 things for Christmas that year, 1981, including Golden Dream Christie, a basic doll trunk for her clothes, a Corvette car for her, a Quiz Whiz game, and a knitting machine. I received all of those things, plus lots of other toys and games, including a Quiz Whiz Challenger and various other electronic and board games. From that year on, I was mainly invested in dolls that expanded my Barbie doll family. I got the first black Sunsational Malibu Ken when he came out, which I learned about from my best friend with whom I mainly played with this collection, along with a Sunsational Malibu Christie, at age 11. It continued to go in new directions the next year.

Around this time, one of my aunt's friends established foundations for the small collection of dolls that I have from Africa and the Caribbean when she brought me 2 straw dolls from the Bahamas, with my name sewn on them in straw (including the accent mark!). It was interesting to learn of my family roots there years later, so those dolls turned out to be a blessing in more ways than one.

I won't ever forget the Barbie doll crisis I thought was building in the days leading up to Christmas of 1983 when I was 12, a period during which my aunt got married. In the midst of all of my family's final preparations for the Christmas-themed wedding, which from my end included my final fitting at Gayfers for my emerald green dress and matching tinted shoes that I was wearing to be a part of the wedding as a candle lighter, I took a look at the Christmas tree daily. My heart dropped day after day because I did not see a one box shaped like a Barbie doll box under it. I looked at the tree day by day in disbelief for not seeing one box that could remotely be a Barbie box. My cousin Lamar, who loved his collection of Hot Wheels cars, got a big kick out of my situation and had a ball laughing at me and teasing me about the looks of things, for it seemed clear that I was not receiving any Barbie dolls that year. But within days, I got to laugh at him, too, when he ended up in the same boat because my uncle and aunt threatened not to buy him this electronic race car he wanted. To cover our bases, we cut a deal so that he would suggest that they give me a Barbie doll for my gift, and I would suggest his race car to my mom. Finally, Christmas morning, I prepared myself to face the day without receiving one Barbie doll to add to my doll family. I was so surprised and happy to get several Barbie dolls as I opened my gifts; my mom had thrown me off by putting the smaller Barbie boxes inside larger shirt boxes!

Soon after that, like everyone, I became fascinated with Cabbage Patch Kids and was amazed to see news stories about parents clamoring for the precious boxes in stores. They were clearly a cultural obsession. The official Cabbage Patch Kid that my mom bought me at age 12 was a black one with 2 ponytails whose name was listed on the "Certificate of Authenticity" as Libby Elizabet, as in a "bet" in a card game. So that wasn't a typo. Before I got mine, my other best friend had received a boy whose name was "Bertram," a name I had never heard before. I felt that I already knew something about their history and origin because my grandparents had bought me the book on Xavier Roberts's Little People Pals at Gayfers, which I read and treasured, including all of its beautiful pictures that helped to tell the amazing story of his soft sculpture dolls. I studied the pattern that the book included and longed to have one of my own.

My mother ran off the pattern and my grandmother bought beautiful brown fabric and the black yarn for the hair until we could find the right person to make them. Every now and then, I'd take the fabric and yarn out of the plastic bag in which we stored them, look at them and try to picture how the dolls would look. I'd then carefully put all of the materials back in the bag and put it away. I hoped that the yarn would be enough to cover both dolls' heads. I could not wait until the day that I finally had my own "adoption dolls." Meantime, because I knew the basic composition of the dolls from studying the pattern in the book so well, I pulled off a few miniature ones and filled my Barbie doll kingdom with several as decoration for the beds, replete with ribbons and rooted hair.

One day, we had a visitor in our extended family who said she could sew and promised to make them, and I gave her the bag of materials. But I never saw it again and the dolls never materialized. This was so disappointing.

I had gotten over it by the time I was 14, and so was surprised when my grandmother, Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson, mentioned that a neighbor down the street was making and selling the dolls for $60 and said that she intended to buy me one. I was a bit older by then but still very excited to finally have my doll. A few days later, my grandmother and I went down to Mrs. Essie Thomas's house to meet with her and put in our order. Mrs. Thomas showed us the fabric options that allowed her to make dolls in 3 shades, including white, light and brown skin shades. She dressed them in dresses and bloomers with matching shoes that she also made, thickly rooted their hair with yarn ponytails tied with ribbons, then painted on the eyes as features. Her workmanship was outstanding. I admired it and found it to be inspiring. Her dolls were absolutely beautiful. We decided to place an order for 2 that evening, a brown one and a light one with black yarn hair. Around that time, another neighbor and her sister ordered one with a white skin tone and brown hair for their daughter and niece, who was half my age. The dolls were beautiful and I proudly displayed them on my bed at home, among stuffed animals. One was dressed in a red checkered dress and the other in pink polka dots. My mom suggested that I name them "Adrienne" and "Nanette," to echo the names of my great grandmothers, Ada Jenkins and Nancy Richardson. My grandmother and aunt Pam also ordered one for Pam's baby daughter Keri, who was around five months old. It was nice to know about and witness Mrs. Thomas's creative work as she filled several orders for girls on our street and to see the final results.

In general, many women on our street made things or sold products to supplement their main income, so I also thought of Mrs. Thomas’s doll crafting in a continuum with those enterprises. For years, my grandmother had bought our Lucky Heart hair grease from Mrs. Thomas's next door neighbor, Mrs. Thompson, along with the tar-based hair shampoo that my grandfather liked. We regularly bought cakes and rolls from our cousin Eddie Mae, who lived in the house on the corner and who babysat me growing up, along with her mother, "Mama Berta," short for Lueberta. Miss Emma and her sister, Miss Sara, both sold Cokes, and had real refrigerators from the company in their homes where they mainly sold them to loyal teen customers, including my aunt and other teens, as they were growing up. Next door, Mrs. Mitchell, who was a hairdresser, was well known for making delicious rolls and regularly filled orders for them. Another neighbor sold Avon, and another Mary Kay. My own grandmother did private duty nursing and did not sell anything on her own time, but took up a collection annually on behalf of the March of Dimes on our street. She would usually also assume the responsibility for going around to take up a collection to give to any neighbor who had experienced a loss, on behalf of the neighborhood. I usually accompanied her. Annually, she also always took other neighborhood children and me Trick or Treating. Mrs. Thomas's dolls were yet another illustration of how entrepreneurial many of our women neighbors were.

When I was in tenth grade and at age 15, as a member of the Dora Beverly Federated Youth Club in Montgomery, I made a small soft sculpture doll and dressed her in a purple jumper and white blouse (pictured above), the organization's official colors, to enter her in the talent competition at the state convention. When I finished, I went and showed Mrs. Thomas my work. She painted on the eyes for me, then drew on a mouth. It was a great honor to have her add the finishing touches to my work. I was happy when it won a Second Place Prize in the competition at the convention.

It is astonishing that Mrs. Thomas did her extraordinary work to design and make soft-sculpture dolls on top of her full-time job; I usually saw her from a distance coming or going and wearing her white uniform. She and her husband had 2 sons, John R. Thomas, a dentist, and Ricky Thomas, a lawyer (he lived in Jacksonville and passed away in 2012), who continue her legacy through their beautiful families and all of her grandchildren. I wish her generations many blessings now and always. I am so thankful to have known her and for her impact on my life. I will always treasure the dolls that she made, including the ones for me, and the story of her outstanding and beautiful doll craftsmanship. I am sharing its impact on me because her work made a difference in my life and she provided an important artistic example when I was growing up. It is a story that the world needs to hear about, one to which I proudly bear witness. The 2 soft-sculpture dolls that she designed and made are also featured with the smaller ones I made myself in the 2008 short film about my art quilts, A Portrait of the Artist.

As I graduated from high school, I also became interested in building a porcelain doll collection. But my porcelain doll collection (pictured above) does not hold a candle to the extensive collection from places like Home Shopping Network and QVC that literally filled the living room of my grandmother’s cousin Lee Frank Jenkins’s wife Pauline Jenkins, which she began in her senior years. My cousins and I enjoyed seeing her doll wonderland in the late 1990s, which my grandmother had described, and posing with them one night (see photos above). It was as extraordinary as my grandmother had described, and one really had to see it to believe it. All kinds of dolls were literally lining the walls in every room of the house with the porcelain ones showcased up front, where the living room doubled as a gallery for their display. I was saddened to hear of Pauline's passing earlier this year and will never forget her extraordinary collection.

My favorite doll story from my grandmother herself is the one about her and her sister Janie Mae Reese, Aunt Mae, accidentally finding these black “bald-headed dolls” that their Aunt Vinnie had bought them for Christmas when they were children during the 1920s, taking them out of the trunk to play with them for a little while, and then putting them back. Aunt Vinnie also gave them China tea set pieces of her daughter Amanda, who was born during the 1800s and whom she had lost years before they were born. We still have and treasure the ones that she gave my grandmother. Aunt Mae enjoyed homemade and handmade crafts made by some of her co-workers at John Knox Manor and South Haven nursing homes where she was a beloved staff member. She bought cream-colored and white poodle dogs made of yarn and wire coat hangers from one of them for my cousin Sharon, Lamar's sister, and me. From another, she bought my grandmother one of the lovely doll tissue-paper holders made of a plastic doll stuck wearing a large pink and white crocheted hoop dress to disguise the tissue roll underneath, which my grandmother thought was lovely, put away for safe keeping, and never considered using for that purpose; Aunt Mae kept her own yellow one on display. Another gift to her from Aunt Mae was a decorative doll with a red cloth face framed by a long braid running from one side of her face to the other. In my grandfather's family, I love hearing the stories about "Cousin Ludie (Meadows)," who went and participated in the March on Washington, and who had a very extensive and beautiful collection of antique porcelain dolls, which my mom loved seeing when she was growing up. I also love the photos of the beautiful black dolls that my grandmother, who long collected whatnots, bought my mother and aunt during the 1950s and ‘60s, which can be seen among our vintage family photos in other posts on this blog. Three of Pam's dolls from her childhood, including Barbie, Francie and Skooter dolls from the 1960s that my grandparents gave her, and Swingy from Aunt Mae and Uncle Richard, are still at home. I am from a family in which many other women have also loved dolls and related things.

I treasure all of the dolls that I have ever owned through the years, about 145 in all, and have the vast majority of them, minus the 10 or so damaged or destroyed in the play process. The ones that our neighbor Mrs. Thomas made for me in Montgomery and so close to my home will always have a special place in my heart, along with her. I treasure them all the more as gifts from my grandmother. Thank you, Mrs. Thomas, for making my dream of having those “adoption dolls” come true. Hugs and blessings to you eternally in heaven.

Reflections on the Dorothy Dandridge Quilt and the Genius of Halle Berry

2016-08-29T09:24:00.001-07:00

Dorothy Dandridge as Carmen Jones, 1954

Halle Berry as Carmen Jones, 1999

Views of the Dorothy Dandridge quilt in art studio during several stages of composition

“Dorothy Dandridge Playing Carmen Jones” Installation-style quilt. Includes sound technology features. Composition 2012-2014.

The 1954 musical film Carmen Jones starring the legendary and iconic actress Dorothy Dandridge, alongside the actor Harry Belafonte, is one of the most famous productions in African American cinematic history. When I watched it growing up, I most enjoyed it for its dynamic singing performances, including the riveting performance of “Dat’s Love” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO5udGCZ3Yo. As an adult, I’ve recognized the deeper contours of the title character, including her wise, memorable and witty lines, such as the one “Bait your hook on fish you can fry” spoken to a younger woman. I also love the film for memories that my grandmother, Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson, shared with me as I was growing up about its impact among some of the women she knew when it came out. She said that some women she knew at home in Montgomery, Alabama actually went out and bought their own “Carmen Jones” outfits, and that some women in our extended family also started a group that they named “The Carmen Jones Savings Club,” including one of her sisters-in-law, my great uncle’s wife, “Aunt Honey.” His brother’s wife also had the nickname “Honey,” and nieces and nephews called her “Aunt Honey,” too. So sometimes, as part of hearing the story, I would get clarification from my grandmother by asking, “Which one?” She said that the group even elected officers and met regularly. She said that she wasn’t a member herself, but clearly enjoyed witnessing the fascination that many of the women she knew, along with their friends, had with the film. She usually told the story when Carmen Jones was on television. The profound influence of the film Carmen Jones among some women of her generation of black women is palpable in her stories of how paeans to it seeped into their everyday lives and underscores how deeply Dandridge inspired her contemporaries through her talent, beauty and glamour on screen.

As an art quilter, all of this is mainly what influenced me to develop an art quilt in honor of Dorothy Dandridge for my Hollywood Series. For me, the quilt of her simultaneously recollects the larger cultural influence of Dandridge as an actress as well as the powerful stories that my grandmother told me about the impact of Dandridge’s famous character. In making this art quilt, whose various stages of development are illustrated in the photos above, I decided on a sepia background to invoke 1930s aesthetics from Hollywood’s golden era and underscore the common ground shared by Dandridge’s beauty and glamour on screen as a black woman actress with that of actresses from the golden era who were typically white and blonde, even though Dandridge was associated with later decades as an actress, and the film itself is from the '50s. While they are unseen, the backs of my art quilts are also always carefully designed. In the case of this quilt, I chose to make the back out of synthetic fur, again, to invoke 1930s glamour.

Like the Marilyn Monroe quilt that I discussed in a recent post, my art quilt featuring Dorothy Dandridge was developed as a larger, installation-style work, includes a soundtrack component and highlights more of the body as a “torso quilt.“ Like the Monroe quilt, it was developed with many of the design principles from engineering, architecture and geometry that come to a head in the large Debutante Triple Quilt installation that grounds the “Portraits II” exhibition and features quilts of my grandmother, grandfather Joe Richardson, and aunt Pamela. Its visible cleavage, curvy form, graceful hands and tilted head celebrate and showcase the femininity of the character Carmen Jones, and more broadly, that of Dandridge. Like the Monroe quilt, it is veiled, which helps to add another layer of mystique and heightens the glamour, while hinting at the status of Monroe and Dandridge as contemporaries in the sense that the Dandridge film biopic portrayed. I used the red nails left over from the Josephine Baker quilt for Dandridge’s manicure. The red rose that the hands are holding had to be special ordered. Because they are on such prominent display in this case, the hands do not include the cardboard inserts that typically underpin my torso quilts, although the quilt is grounded by the typical sculpted and stuffed body. I bought the red fabric for the skirt new, as is the case with most of the fabric I use for my quilts, but the black lace was thankfully among the materials in my fabric files (I keep just 3 small boxes of fabric on hand in a closet). Rooting the hairline a few strands at a time, as is the case with all of my quilts, was very painstaking and time-consuming work. The hair, too, is designed to capture the glamour of the Carmen Jones character.

I love the way that the piece turned out. At exhibitions, I am always intrigued and inspired to hear word of who likes what and why. For some, it was interesting to hear that this quilt was their favorite one of all in the show, including my mother’s close friend Zandra Moore. My aunt Pam liked it a lot as well, as I saw when she went back to take just one more look at it before we left the gallery room, when 60 of my art quilts that made up “Portaits II” were on public exhibition in Montgomery last year from January 10-March 27, 2015 as part of the 60th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery March. I went through the gallery room several times with her and my mother and they also saw it several times on their own. I was glad that my uncle toured it, too.

The art quilts that make up my Hollywood Series always honor actors and actresses “in action” in one of their most memorable roles. This quilt honoring Dandridge, because Halle Berry is one of my favorite actresses and portrayed Dandridge so compellingly and so spot-on in the biopic Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999), to the point of becoming visually indistinguishable from her in my mind in a way, makes me think about Halle Berry as well. The compelling visual similarity to Dandridge as an actress in this film reminded me of her portrayal of Queen, Alex Haley’s maternal ancestor, in the television miniseries by that same name in 1993. The amazing back story about Berry being born in the very same Cleveland, Ohio hospital as Dandridge is just one factor that makes me agree, like so many, that Berry was born and destined to play this role. And like so many, I won’t ever forget that night at the Oscars in 2002 when Berry became the first black woman in history to win an Academy Award for Best Actress. She became the fulfillment of dreams for many other black women, including Dandridge, and as Berry said in her tearful and heartfelt acceptance speech, opened the door. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llgL7mGYVTI

However, I learned another valuable lesson that night that always comes to mind for me when I think about Halle Berry, though it was less obvious. Let me explain. I was fascinated by her story of the lengths that she went to in preparing for her first major film role as the character Viv in Spike Lee’s 1991 film Jungle Fever, to the point of getting so into her character as a crack addict that she said she did not bathe for 10 days! Once she got her first film role, and even for a relatively minor character, she gave it everything she had. She went on to hone her craft and build a body of work throughout the 1990s in films such as Boomerang (1992) and Losing Isaiah (1995). In spite of our hardest work, sometimes it feels as if we do not always get the recognition or respect that we deserve, and it can feel as if our best efforts and most beautiful work is invisible. It seemed as if the Dandridge role made critics notice and appreciate Berry in an entirely different way. I thought it dazzling when she was invited to introduce the work of film sound technicians at an awards show, and mimicked the various sound effects on stage that go into film, a routine that alone showcased so much talent and wit. During one of her first major acceptance speeches, it touched my deepest heart when she said that for the first time, she felt as if she was really a part of Hollywood. In spite of her years of hard work, she was likely referring to having had a lingering feeling of being an outsider in the industry, or of still being on the margins. For example, for most of the 1990s, as Berry went about her work, Denzel Washington was an actor who was widely known. Much of her hard and passionate acting work, including the brilliant body of work that she was building, was not as widely known. Yet, I noticed that both she and Washington received the ultimate award and recognition as Best Actress and Best Actor, respectively, on the very same night! Their walks down very different paths extraordinarily converged that historic night. It was a moment that inspired me deeply and reminded me to continue to do my best work and be my best no matter what, and no matter who ever recognizes, validates it or sees it. It reminded me to keep running my very best race. It reminded me that God knows and cares how hard we work even if no one else seems to notice. Hers is a story that inspired me to keep walking by faith.

I value and treasure the mentoring that I have in my family, in academia, and among friends in the profession. In my life, I have always kept an open mind and operated on the premise that I can potentially learn from many people, including those far beyond the worlds in which I primarily move and live. I find my mentors far and wide. For example, I believe that the playbook and professional insights that I developed as a teen by reading biographical accounts and hearing about business projects of women such as the supermodels Beverly Johnson, Naomi Sims, Iman, Carol Alt, Naomi Campbell, Veronica Webb, and Cindy Crawford, and others, helped me a lot, inspired me, taught me well and are a big part of why I approach all of my work in the way that I do now. As I continued my work as a scholar in California, I even eventually came to see Halle Berry as a kind of mentor, too, for the principles that I began to learn from her as I navigated my academic career.

My view of her in this sense fully consolidated when I read a piece on her in the March 10, 2002 New York Times, which described just how long and how much she and her manager persisted until finally winning the rights to the Dorothy Dandridge film. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/10/movies/oscar-films-halle-berry-bruised-and-beautiful-is-on-a-mission.html?pagewanted=all%22%3E%3C/a%3E. I admired the commitment of her manager to her, realized how serious she had always been about what she was doing and what her goals were, and liked her tenacity. And even as she celebrated the contributions of black women the night of her Oscar win, it was not like she was sitting around to waiting to be validated by anyone or seeking anyone’s permission or approval to do her work. She just threw herself into it and worked her hardest and her best to achieve her goals. All of that deeply influenced and inspired me and helped me to just work hard and focus on my goals, regardless of what anyone was doing around me and of who thought what. To just be true to your craft and let your passion drive you is a major lesson that I have learned from Halle Berry.

The other thing that helped me begin to see her in this way was an interview with her that I saw on Actor’s Studio in 2007. http://www.watchseries.ac/episode/inside_the_actors_studio_s13_e14.html. While a lot of media tends to play up the beauty of her face, for an hour, it was nice to see the spotlight focus primarily on her high level of intelligence and beautiful, articulate voice and to hear her discuss in a sustained way what it means to be an artist and how she goes about her work. At one point, she began to describe what it had meant to “work with” various directors and what she had learned from them in the process, including ones like Benicio Del Toro. I liked that outlook. It resonated with how I also view my career. It helped me to make the most and learn the most from the expertise of various colleagues and to understand what it means to work with them for the time that I have to do so, and to recognize the privilege in having such opportunities, which do not last always and eventually come to an end. For example, in this sense, I fully appreciate what a privilege and honor it was to have my first job in a department for ten years where the writer and artist Clarence Major was my senior colleague in the field of African American literature. I am proud and thankful that to this day he thinks of me as a friend. I can say the same thing about the profound impact that the historian Clarence Walker made on my life and career and continue to value his mentoring. Similarly, I have learned a lot from the work of the scholar Patricia A. Turner, including her campus leadership, work in folklore and outstanding research on quilting for which she has interviewed me and documented my work. I am very proud and honored to have worked with them and so many others, and very thankful for what I learned.

I realize that it can be challenging to work in some places and have definitely had challenges of my own; my work has by no means been all sunshine and roses all the time. But I always say that the world can always send you a bigger enemy, and so believe that it’s best not to ever invest too much time or energy in fighting metaphysical battles about any folks on the job. It amazes me now that people whom I linked to big problems or struggles at various points are no longer even in my life now. I think of all of the wasted time spent worrying about this and that, which was pointless, really. Life would have been a lot better if I had just listened to my grandmother and forgotten about all of it, and not thought about it because "They're not thinking about you." Indeed, my life and perspective changed altogether when I asked her at age 89 in 2007 what her best time had been so far, and she told me “the time when I was in Florida.” She was referring to her work in the Navy Yard in Pensacola during World War II. She kept her identity card and even took my mother and uncle down there during the 1950s so that her colleagues could see them. That was my wake-up call. My rant sounded like this: “I could not say that about my job in a million years! My grandmother feels that way, though that was during the era of Jim Crow. Generations should move forward, and not back! This is the 21st century and I can't say that I feel that way, even now. Ten years is a long time to be in any place. If I lived to be 100, then 10 years would be a tenth of life! I won’t ever stay 10 years in another place again where I am not entirely happy.” I also vowed that from then on, it would be important to me that my work also be “happy and fun,” if I am to be in a place and do it. I choose to view the glass as “half full,” rather than “half empty.” I tend to view my work environment in a far more optimistic way and keep the bar for it set high because of the perspective that I learned from role models such as my grandmother and Halle Berry.

I use the word “genius” very purposely in describing Halle Berry because I believe she is one. She has always had the courage, ambition and drive to “think outside the box” and march to the beat of her own drum while working very hard to achieve her goals and in a way from which many people can learn. I know I have. In the month of her 50th birthday year, I honor her for all of this and more.

Of Halle Berry, I sometimes say that I believe that she has the “gift of contentment.” I admire the sincere love that she showed children well before ever having children of her own, including the little girl who starred as her daughter in the Dorothy Dandridge film. I actually met the little girl who played Berry’s daughter in this film with her family in Sacramento at a group art show in Florin Mall sponsored by Les Belles Artes in 1999 when I was exhibiting two of my early quilts, and after I had made my very first portrait quilt.

I’m tremendously thankful for Berry’s work to bring the film about Dorothy Dandridge to the big screen, and for how, momentarily, she, too, recaptured and embodied the power and charisma of Carmen Jones and helped to share the story of Dorothy Dandridge with the world, including newer generations. In my mind, I already have the image of the quilt that I would make of Halle Berry if I ever did. There’s something in particular about her image in the James Bond film Die Another Day (2002) that jumps out for me as an artist, and so it’s perhaps the story about Berry that I’d be most interested in capturing in my medium. I am also one of those people who liked and learned from the film Catwoman (2004) and think that it had more to offer than the critics recognized.

Finally, I grew up mainly hearing about Malibu as Barbie’s hometown. The other artistic thing that jumps out to me and that I appreciate about Berry is her white “dream house” on the beach in Malibu, whose photos I love. It is an amazing piece of architecture.

Collecting Southern Folk Art by Self-Taught Artists in Alabama and Beyond

2016-08-06T20:24:00.002-07:00

Riché Richardson, Photographs Taken on July 20, 2016

Riché Richardson's Home Office Featuring Art Quilts by Chris Clark, Photo Taken March 29, 2016

Riché Richardson Pictured with Mose Tolliver, "Mose T," at His Montgomery Home and Art Studio, July 1999

Riché Richardson and Mother Joanne Richardson Pictured with Lee Harris, "The Renaissance Man," at His Montgomery Home and Art Studio, July 1999

By Riché Richardson

I began my collection of Southern folk art in 1999 while working as an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis and have continued to nourish and grow it over the years. My collection of original Southern folk art, which so far includes 12 different artists and nearly 50 paintings on wood, canvas and cloth of various sizes, is grounded by the work of Alabama artists, especially Mose Tolliver. Works by Jimmy Lee Sudduth and Bernice Sims also make up the core and foundation of the collection. Almost a dozen paintings and art quilts (the collection's first ever) by Birmingham, Alabama artist Chris Clark are also now included. His work is among my favorite art to live with in both my home and office because of its core thematic content related to religion, music and community. Indeed, he has been referred to as a “gospel singer of the visual arts.” Other artists in my collection include Michael Banks, Mose T.'s daughter Annie Tolliver, and Lee Harris (aka "The Renaissance Man"). Furthermore, the collection includes works by Zelle Manning, Myrtice West, Ruby Williams, Leonard Jones and Mary L. Proctor.

The self-portrait by Jimmy Lee Sudduth and Michael Banks's monumental tribute to Mose T. (a departure from Banks's technique reminiscent of Jean Michel-Basquiat's) and the pair of paintings by Mose T. that feature Tolliver's self-portrait and a portrait of his wife, are the works largest in scale; the painting by Lee Harris of the flower vase is the smallest. The collection is fueled by my origins in Montgomery, Alabama and my commitments to supporting the work of Alabama artists and to living with and celebrating Alabama art and the art of the U.S. South more generally. I also find inspiration in it given my self-identification as an Alabama-born mixed-media appliqué quilt artist and my academic work as a scholar in the field of Southern studies, along with black/Africana studies and African American literature. Thematically, my collection touches on topics from the Civil Rights Movement to the tragedy of September 11.

The academic who has inspired this collection most is bell hooks, whose powerful story of collecting African American art is chronicled in the critical essays in her book Art on My Mind. It deeply inspired me when I first read it as a graduate student in the PhD program in English at Duke University in the 1990s. I later began to build a collection of art when I became an assistant professor and focused on the genre of Southern folk art. California-based artists are at the core of the other original art that I have collected, including Clarence Major, Milton Bowens, Kelvin Curry and Joyce Carley. In addition, I have an original piece by Tom Feelings, along with several original pieces by Jamaican artists and some others.

Pieces from my Southern folk art collection were borrowed for an African American art exhibition held on the campus of University of California, Davis at the Nelson Gallery during the summer of 2007, which was curated by Felicenne Ramey, an exhibition that drew on the art collections of various faculty and featured works by Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Elizabeth Catlett. I also loaned my collection for exhibition to the public at the Carol Tatkon Art Gallery at Cornell University from February-June 2012, which was curated by Christine O'Malley and Larissa Hensley and sponsored by New Student Programs, the Office of the Provost and the Office of the Dean of Students.

Mose Tolliver Paintings

Annie Tolliver

Michael Banks

Bernice Sims

Jimmy Lee Sudduth

Zelle Manning

Ruby Williams

Betty Sue Matthews

Mary Proctor

The Renaissance Man

Myrtice West

Leonard Jones

Chris Clark

The Marvelous Marilyn Monroe: Commemorating 90 Years!

2016-06-05T20:22:00.000-07:00

I created my art quilt entitled “The Marvelous Marilyn Monroe” (Composition 2011-2014) in honor of the iconic Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe and wanted to be sure to post it to help commemorate her 90th birthday week (June 1, 2016). It is inspired by one of her most famous performances of all time, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” in the film Gentlemen Prefer Blonds(1953). I remember seeing the singer Madonna’s video for "Material Girl"(1984) when I was a preteen, which references this classic performance by Monroe and became a metaphor for thinking of and referring to Madonna as a singer and cultural phenomenon. Back then, I didn’t have familiarity with Monroe’s performance as the background that inspired Madonna’s in the video.

The latter is intriguing for epitomizing what the theorist Jean Baudrillard describes as the potential of the simulacrum (See Simulacra and Simulation, 1981) to displace and overshadow the real. Ultimately, Monroe emerges as a kind of mentor and muse for Madonna. The unapologetic emphasis on materialism as a basis for establishing relationships is not ideal, but it is interesting that both songs invoke the theme in attempting to school women on dating and relationships. Madonna’s song offers the reminder that “the boy with the cold hard cash is always Mr. Right.” Marilyn’s song is amusing to the extent that it advises younger women, in instances when they are doing the unthinkable and dating married men, to “get that ice or else no dice,” kindly confiding to them that “he’s your guy when stocks are high, but beware when they start to descend. It’s then that those louses go back to their spouses, diamonds are a girl’s best friend.” The most iconic images from that singing performance show Monroe surrounded by young men in identical black suits, but it's also important to recognize the role that young women dancers dressed in pink play in the scene, including the mentoring relationship that Monroe establishes in relation to all of them. The pink roses that trim my art quilt honoring Monroe allude to them and to this latter woman-to-woman dynamic in the scene, along with the larger roses positioned around its edges, which recall the flowers that they all wore in their hair. This song's main message is later invoked in songs such as Herb Alpert and Janet Jackson’s “Diamonds”(1987). Liz Taylor profoundly suggested it as well.

No woman has ever as fully embraced Marilyn Monroe’s legacy as the model Anna Nicole Smith, who recast it in visually stunning and compelling ways. All of that visual play intrigued me from an artistic standpoint. Years ago, I enjoyed watching the reality show with her beloved dog Sugarpie to get a better sense of who she was. Now, I look forward to checking out the photos of the attire that her daughter Dannielynn and the child's father Larry Birkhead wear to the annual Kentucky Derby, the major public event that Dannielynn has grown up attending. What I find most interesting about the song "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," and the reason that I like it and even believe that it holds some feminist implications, is that it urges women to resist ways in which some men attempt to discard, dismiss and devalue them over time by urging women to keep their focus on the big picture and to invest in themselves instead of seeking elusive or ephemeral forms of validation. In her song, that something as materialistic as a diamond emerges as the "friend" that sticks with and stays true to a woman over time in life, in a way that a man may not, is a limiting message and vision in the end, however. What a Friend We Have in Jesus, to invoke the Christian hymn by that name, is endlessly and supremely powerful and true.

Marilyn Monroe is an inspiration for having reinvented herself and become such a powerful and enduring icon, though the persona that she created limited her and held her captive in some ways. I like her and value her legacy for the cultural impact that she made, then as now. As a preteen, it was interesting to see a character like Paulette Rebchuck in Grease 2(1982) who was so obviously influenced by Monroe in styling and demeanor. Monroe epitomized the "bombshell" model of femininity described in Laren Stover’s book The Bombshell Manual of Style (2001), which affirms that beauty and brains can go together and discusses the characteristics of this type of woman in detail across its rich and revealing chapters. Monroe intrigues me because, in all her uniqueness, she makes me think comparatively about modern womanhood, and reflect on its complexity and diversity at other levels, to the extent that she embodied and helped to set the standard for the modern woman in her time, including what was possible in the way of self-invention and self-definition, even as her iconic, youthful, pale, platinum blond aesthetics ran counter to those of many of her contemporaries who were living life in their own ways outside of the Hollywood limelight and who lacked her global platform, including, say, women who were not as privileged in terms of class or whose lives were defined by a rural, agrarian aesthetic and temporality. In my "Portraits II" quilt show featuring 60 quilts(2015), Marilyn Monroe’s impact on the American cultural imagination as a woman during the 1950s is also important to think about in juxtaposition with Rosa Parks as a woman who changed the world during that time by catalyzing an international freedom movement in 1955 when she remained seated on the city bus in Montgomery. My quilts of both of them that are included in the show underscore these points. My art print cards, as sets, also often juxtapose figures that ideologically don't fit together or that serve as radical and critical points of contrast. For example, I framed Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara (who, with Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, inaugurated the Hollywood Series in my 2008 debut show), alongside Malcolm X, who was represented in the Political Series.

In the early stages of developing this art quilt in 2011, I was thankful to see a wax figure of Monroe on a trip to Los Angeles, as well as her tribute on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and to take pictures. In my “Portraits II” quilt show, the art quilt featuring Marilyn Monroe was a multi-year installation-style project in its construction and falls into the category of “torso quilts,” which draw on principles of engineering, architecture and geometry in their design and incorporate a soundtrack component. Several works in this category, which are replete with lighting and sound effects, help to ground the show, whose centerpiece, at this level, is the Debutante Triple Quilt Installation featuring my grandparents and aunt. Like the quilt featuring Dorothy Dandridge, the Monroe quilt is veiled, which adds to its drama, mystique and theatricality. The quilt of Monroe, which is double the standard weight of my typical torso quilts, is literally shaped like a diamond, in juxtaposition with the rectangular shape of the Dandridge quilt and the triangulated ones in the debutante series. In gallery space when the quilts are on public exhibition, audiences are able to ponder the quilt of Monroe (replete with bosomy cleavage) in a continuum with the one featuring my grandmother formally attired in more reserved evening wear in the debutante series, and to consider the differing and contrasting ways in which both figures beautifully embody what it meant to be a “lady” and “woman” in previous decades. Similarly, in thinking about American culture more generally, one encounters the Kennedy Brothers in the Political Series. However, one is also led to reflect on the great legacy of Marilyn Monroe as an actress in the Hollywood Series. I use an official Monroe costume as the attire in developing this quilt. The beautiful red manicure had to be filled with architectural inserts for pliability and then covered with the gloves, but I know it's there, like so many features on my quilts that are time-consuming to work on and ultimately hidden, covered up and never seen again. The intricate and exhaustive workmanship is important to me to achieve and is part of the creative process that I most savor.

The hot pink on pale pink color scheme was particularly fun to work with as an artist. I kept several Victoria’s Secret shopping bags on hand in my art studio for inspiration in the process as well. The Victoria’s Secret bag is one that I envision as one of the greatest marketing tools ever! I am truly intrigued that the beribboned bag seems to be quite captivating on its own terms for some people who make purchases there. It’s as if one of the main highlights of shopping in the store is to be able walk out with the bag itself, whatever the precious treasure might be that’s carefully tissue-wrapped inside. My preferences for lingerie, and the brands that I like most for their prettiness and comfort, and wear most, are Chantelle and Hanky Panky with dreams of Dior. However, living away from major department stores as I do here in Ithaca, New York, I’ve had to mix in some items from there. One of my cousins once worked there part time when she was in college. My grandmother saw me wearing a Victoria’s Secret nightie (I have about 7 and feel most comfortable sleeping in them) and wanted to know where I got it, and when I told her, asked for something from there for Christmas one year, and so we bought her pajamas to add to her many pretty sets, and a bag from there was among the gifts for her under the tree.

The Victoria’s Secret bag is such a fascinating item. I always cut off and save the ribbons on them and other store bags in that category and put them in a special box that I keep among my art fabrics and textiles, before recycling the bags, for in a world in which so much is needlessly wasted, those cloth features can be reused in a creative way and for art projects down the road. Its typical hot pink/pale pink color scheme mirrors the one in the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the basic color scheme for this quilt. The pink colors are some of the main ones associated with love, roses and events like Valentine’s Day. I enjoyed making this art quilt and learned a lot in the process. I am posting it on this blog now in tribute to Marilyn Monroe’s 90th birthday week, and for her fans. Blessings to her eternally in the Lord.

The "We Is a Family" Album: Richardson News Features

2016-01-22T19:18:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the selected news features of my core and immediate Richardson family over the years from my Wall of Frames honoring the legacy of my grandparents, Joe Richardson and Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson. This includes the debutante news features of women in my family from over the years, along with those related to some of our federated and civic club activities, Catholic school and Catholic retreat activities, professional activities, and public and civic events, etc. The earliest and perhaps most interesting historical item here is the wedding announcement from the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper in 1938 in which my grandparents are included because they were somehow mistaken for white. It was a blessing to find their marriage license on Easter Sunday in 2015 and to lift up the document to discover this very small clipping taped underneath. I will also be sure to add additional May Day news features from the 1960s once I find them, including one highlighting my uncle Joseph Richardson as May Day King in 1963 at Booker T. Washington Elementary School, along with a news feature of myself as a child pictured in the Montgomery Advertiser with my grandmother's Aunt Viney Russell, who lived to be 109, at one of her birthday parties that were celebrated annually by the television and newspaper media in Montgomery. (I will do a separate post at some point featuring some of the news articles related to Aunt Viney and some of the other members of our extended family). The character 'Tildy from Roots, Chicken George's wife, sums up in the post-Emancipation moment the place in the heart that family holds for us and for so many, and that we even love to hear and say now and then because of the beauty in the meaning: "We is a family, and we is going to stay, a family." All glory to the Lord for who He is and for what He provides.

My dear grandparents, Joe Richardson and Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson, married on October 3, 1938, which was also the birthday of my grandfather’s mother Nancy. My grandparents were together for 47 years until we lost my grandfather in 1985, and my grandmother was here for her 75th anniversary. Giving praises and thanks for the remarkable lives that they lived and for their legacy and sending them my love and wishing blessings upon them in heaven. This past Easter, coming across their 1938 marriage certificate felt like a special gift from heaven. My mother recognized the signature of my grandfather’s brother, her beloved Uncle Murray, on the document as one of the witnesses. Taped and hidden away underneath this document was a very small newspaper clipping mentioning “Joe Richardson” and “Emma Lou Jenkins” as one of the 5 “white couples” who had applied for marriage licenses in recent days. This case of mistaken racial identity is absolutely the only way that this information about my grandparents’ marriage made it into the paper, for the Montgomery Advertiser typically relegated black news to the “colored pages” during that time. My grandparents were somehow grouped with all of the “white couples” by mistake. Interestingly, in the wake of the loss of her first husband, my grandmother’s mother Ada was also listed as “white” in the 1910 census, along with her son, my grandmother’s oldest brother later known as “Jack,” though that was not his name back then; this likely happened because of her light skin color, long black curly hair and their light gray eyes. A decade later, in the 1920 census, she and her children with her husband Frank Jenkins, including my grandmother Emma, are all listed as “mulattos.”
"Marriage Licenses." Montgomery Advertiser. October, 1938.

My mother Joanne Richardson's photo as a baby in a local Montgomery magazine; she is being held here by a white woman in the Junior League visiting as a volunteer when she was sick and in the hospital, likely at St. Jude Hospital. My grandmother, a phenomenal archivist, kept her copy of the magazine among her treasures. Who thinks of possibilities like this when they imagine blacks in Montgomery during the 1950s?

My aunt Pamela Richardson featured in the Montgomery Advertiser as the May Day Queen at Booker T. Washington Elementary school in May of 1970. "'Gala Day Festivities Held at Washington Elementary." Montgomery Advertiser. May, 1970.

Debutante news article in the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper on April, 1976 featuring my aunt, Pamela Richardson. This is the second part of the feature, which unfolded over two weeks, and was published on April 15 and April 22. This is the feature from April 22. "Phi Delta Kappa Debutantes." Montgomery Advertiser. April 22, 1976.

Riché Richardson featured in the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper with fellow debutantes in April, 1989. Chrys Robbins. “Sorority Presents its 19th Annual Debutante Cotillion.” Montgomery Advertiser. April 9, 1989.

A feature that includes an interview with Riché Richardson in the October, 1993 issue of Essence Magazine. Natasha Tarpley. "Voices from the College Front." Essence. October, 1993.

A feature from the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper in the 1990s that includes my cousin Keri Smith (seated third from left) as an elementary student at Resurrection Catholic School with a Nigerian sister. Ron Ellis. "Nigerian Nuns Happy to Help in Montgomery." Montgomery Advertiser. March 13, 1999.

Mother's Day feature from the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper in the early 2000s that highlighted my grandmother Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson's (and Joe Richardson's) recipe for Italian spaghetti.

Feature in the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper highlighting my mother Joanne Richardson's (seated left) work as historian in the Montgomery City Federation of women's clubs. "Club Profiles." Montgomery Advertiser. January 31, 2000.

An early 2000s feature of my aunt, then Pamela Richardson-Smith (standing right), in relation to a community project of the Cosmopolites, her federated club. Deborah Moore. "Federated Club Makes New Year's Presentation." Montgomery Advertiser. January 8, 2004.

My Cousin Keri Smith and her escort featured in the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper in a close-up of the dance during the minuet in April, 2004. Deborah Hayes Moore. "40 Debutantes, Kudos, Presented at Cotillion." Montgomery Advertiser. April, 2004

My cousin Keri Smith, attending a Catholic retreat as a college sophomore, where she performed as a liturgical dancer. She is pictured here on the cover of the regional newsletter that addressed the impact of Hurricane Katrina. In A Word: A Publication of the Society of the Divine Word. Southern Province. 7(Volume 23). November, 2005.

My cousin Megan Smith featured as a debutante in the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper in April, 2006. Deborah Hayes Moore. "Phi Delta Kappa Presents Debutantes, Kudos." Montgomery Advertiser. April 16, 2006.

A 2007 feature of Riché Richardson as artist and scholar in the Davis Enterprise. Beth Curda. “Professor Pays Tribute to Her Southern Roots.” Davis Enterprise. February 28, 2007.

Riché Richardson as the pick to feature in Paris on Inauguration Day, 2009 in the ParisDailyPhoto. Eric Lieu. “Quilt, Always.” ParisDailyPhoto. January 20, 2009.

Riché Richardson featured as an artist in the Cornell Chronicle. Daniel Aloi. "Artist Shares Her Cultural Quilts with Parisians." Cornell Chronicle. January 23, 2009.

Riché Richardson featured in Ezra magazine, Cornell University. Summer 2009. Daniel Aloi. "Riché Richardson Shares Her Art Quilts and American Perspective as a Cultural Envoy in Paris." Ezra. Summer, 2009.

My cousin Megan Smith's former work as production assistant at a business magazine. Amazingly, when I was a little girl, my mother Joanne Richardson also worked in publishing at a business magazine called Business Review Edition in Executive Park in Montgomery during the mid-70s when she was in her 20s.

Riché Richardson featured in the Montgomery Advertiser as a participant, along with Montgomery postmaster Donald Snipes and Rosa Parks Museum Director Georgette Norman in the historic unveiling of a U.S. postage stamp honoring Rosa Parks's 100th birthday, taken during the gala celebration in Montgomery. Associated Press. "Postal Service Unveils Stamp Honoring Rosa Parks." Montgomery Advertiser. February 5, 2013.

Riché Richardson featured in the Ithaca Times in tandem with talk honoring Rosa Parks's 100th birthday. Rob Montana. “Cornell Professor Speaking about Rosa Parks Legacy at Cornell, National Museum.” Ithaca Times. February 6, 2013.

My aunt Pamela R. Garrett (standing far right), a current member and former president, featured in the full-page feature on the Cosmopolites Civic Club in the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper in honor of the organization's 75th anniversary. Deborah Hayes Moore. "75 Years and Counting: Cosmopolites Civic Club Celebrates 75 years in Montgomery and Counting." Montgomery Advertiser. June 15, 2014.

A view of the Debutante Triple-Quilt Installation that reproduces my aunt Pamela Richardson's 1976 debutante cotillion and features her, along with my grandparents, Joe Richardson and Emma Richardson. Rebecca Burylo. “Quilt Artist Honors Civil Rights, Southern Roots.” Montgomery Advertiser. January 11, 2015.

Riché Richardson. “Can We Please, Finally, Get Rid of ‘Aunt Jemima’?” “Room for Debate.” New York Times. June 24, 2015

Various views of the "Wall of Frames" dedicated to my family in my home office. Framed copies of all the newspaper features of the women in my family as debutantes across generations are on display above my desk and complement the debutante photos of women in my family and other photos of us that I keep on the vanity in my bedroom. Various other news features are in the section to the right.

Vintage family photos and various others that have in some cases inspired my art quilts are included on my artist website at http://www.richerichardson.com/#!vintage-family-photos/efizr

Biography of Riché Richardson for the 2015 “Portraits” Art Quilt Exhibition

2015-02-01T20:23:00.002-08:00

Exhibition Title: "Portraits II: From Montgomery to Paris"

Location: Troy University's Rosa Parks Museum, Montgomery, Alabama

Dates: January 10, 2015 - March 27, 2015

July 7, 2014, Standing at Bus Stop on Seneca St. in Ithaca, New York

May 24, 2014, Standing downtown in Ithaca, New York

December 17, 2010, Home in Montgomery, Alabama for the Holidays

January 14, 2009, Giving Talk at the U.S. Ambassador's Residence, Paris, France

August 15, 2008, Dialoging with 4th and 5th Graders from E.D. Nixon Elementary School in Gallery Room at Rosa Parks Museum during the First "Portraits" Art Quilt Show, Montgomery, Alabama

Curator: Daniel Neil with Georgette Norman

Riché Richardson, who was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, made her first portrait art quilt in 1999 and has been developing this project for the past 15 years. She has been diligent in producing various crafts since her childhood from as early as age nine, when she first began to focus on sewing, crocheting and collecting dolls. She taught herself to knit and also eventually made some soft-sculpture dolls during her teen years. Her beautiful art quilts are often described by people who have seen them on exhibition as quilts unlike any that they have ever seen before, as evidenced in the nearly 60 pieces featured here, which also include some of her earliest work.

The distinct signature style of portrait art quilting that she has developed draws on intricate design techniques and incorporates painting and mixed-media to produce hand-stitched, richly detailed, three-dimensional quilts. Her art quilts often unfold as multi-year projects and in some cases have taken several years to develop. With felt providing their foundational fabric and form, her quilting subjects are drawn and painted in a classic style and designed with features such as synthetic hair, eyelashes, and fingernails. They incorporate an eclectic range of materials, including hats, jewelry, shoes, ribbons, orthodontic braces, buttons, safety pins, boas, fruit, beading, flowers, eye glasses, mirrors, and ties, among other items. Her second solo art quilt exhibition, Portraits II: From Montgomery to Paris: The Appliqué Art Quilts of Riché Deianne Richardson, pays tribute to the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery March, the 60th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other anniversaries in Civil Rights Movement history this year. It is dedicated to the memories of her grandparents, Joe Richardson and Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson. This exhibition expands the range of special effects that she incorporates in developing her art quilts and takes her architectural quilting style and the notion of the “built quilt” in some new and quite exciting directions. Thematically speaking, Portraits II continues to develop all of the foundational series of her first quilt show, which debuted at Troy University’s Rosa Parks Museum in 2oo8, and incorporates several more series. The multiple series in which her portrait art quilts are developed include “Family,” “Political,” “Paris,” “Hollywood,” “Black History,” “The Civil Rights Movement,” “African American Literature,” and “Alabama Women,” and new versions of “Daughters of Africa” and “Delta.” In 2013, Richardson served as the invited speaker at the Rosa Parks Museum’s gala 100th birthday celebration of Rosa Parks and donated her quilt in honor of the heroine to the museum, which features this piece in its permanent collection.

The family quilts recall May Day celebrations in Montgomery, Alabama dating back to the 1960s, as well as Easter parades, school programs, and birthday celebrations. They recreate family debutante portraits from the 1970s to the 2000s. In the process, they capture a side of black life, particularly in the U.S. South, less frequently discussed. As curator Georgette Norman describes “Portraits” in the 2008 catalog for the show at Rosa Parks Museum, it “draws on aspects of Montgomery and Civil Rights history, but focuses on family showing the dignity and beauty that always existed . . . Portraits . . . captures in new form family photos and memories, and also treats political and cultural figures from Martin Luther King to Scarlett O’Hara.“ The new show is grounded by a Montgomery Bus Boycott Series that features quilts honoring Rosa Parks, E.D. Nixon and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a tribute to the 60th anniversary year of the historic movement that helps to lead off commemorations in the city of Montgomery in 2015. It features several large installation-style “torso quilts,” including the large triple quilt installation in the debutante series, which is replete with digital media such as light and sound features and also draws on principles of geometry, engineering, and architecture in its development.

The body of quilts from “Portraits” is the subject of the short film by Anne Crémieux and Géraldine Chouard entitled A Portrait of the Artist (2008), which was shot on location in Paris, France, and highlighted an interview with the scholar Patricia A. Turner. Pat Turner also discusses the “Portraits” project in her book Crafted Lives: Stories and Studies of African American Quilters (2009). Quilts from “Portraits” are featured in Lauren Cross’s film The Skin Quilt Project (2010). Richardson’s work has been exhibited at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., the Eastville Community Historical Society in Sag Harbor, New York, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery, Alabama, the Carol Tatkon Center Art Gallery at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and the Mairie du 5e in Paris. In January of 2009 she was invited to Paris as a “Cultural Envoy” by the U.S. Embassy in France for the opening of its national quilt exhibition, “Un Patchwork de Cultures,” under the sponsorship of a grant from the U.S. Department of State in its Speaker Series. On this visit to Paris, she was honored with a talk, reception, exhibition and film screening at the U.S. Ambassador’s Residence in the city, an event attended by an audience of 150 people.

Riché Richardson has been highly productive as an artist, but she is a scholar who primarily devotes her time to her academic writing and research. She earned her B.A. from Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia and her Ph.D. from Duke University. She is currently an associate professor in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University with interests in African American literature, American literature, Southern studies and gender studies. She spent the first 10 years of her academic career teaching at the University of California, Davis (1998-2008). In 2001, she received a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her essays have been published in journals such as American Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, TransAtlantica, the Southern Quarterly, Black Camera, NKA, Phillis, and Technoculture. Her first book, Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), was highlighted by Choice Books among the "Outstanding Academic Titles of 2008," and by Eastern Book Company among the "Outstanding Academic Titles, Humanities, 2008." Her second book examines the U.S. South in relation to black femininity and the national body. Since 2005, she has served as the coeditor of the New Southern Studies book series at the University of Georgia Press, a series that has released 12 books thus far. Most recently, she was invited to join the Delta Research and Educational Foundation’s Sister Scholars Advisory Council. She was initiated in Spelman’s Eta Kappa Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. in 1992 and is currently a member of the Montgomery Alumnae Chapter.

Portraits II: From Montgomery to Paris 2015

2015-01-06T17:53:00.000-08:00

Portraits II: From Montgomery to Paris: The Appliqué Art Quilts of
Riché Deianne Richardson (2015)

Exhibition Dedicated to Mr. Joe Richardson and Mrs. Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson

By Riché Richardson

Curator: Daniel Neil with Georgette Norman

Early Work: A Retrospective and Prelude to “Portraits”

Includes Delta Quilt Series, Daughters of Africa Series, Family Quilt, Autobiography Quilt, and Africa Quilt Series (10 works)

Soft-sculpture doll honoring purple uniform of Alabama Association of Federated Youth Clubs completed at age 16. Second place prize winner at annual state convention. Eyes painted on by Dorothy Thomas, a neighbor who made and sold soft-sculpture dolls (1987).

Soft-sculpture doll made at age 18 to decorate dormitory room in Packard Hall at Spelman College freshman year the summer before leaving for college(1989)

“Delta Love.” First art quilt produced in 1992 as a new member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., in Spelman College’s Eta Kappa Chapter; this organization also first exhibited Riché Richardson’s art when featuring this piece in an exhibition on Spelman’s campus in 1993. This Delta art quilt also includes two small replicas in the collections of the artist’s Delta “Speshes,” Soror Patsy K. Rucker Mccray and Soror Riché Daniel Barnes

“My Family Quilt”(1993)

“Destiny’s Child: Borrowed Robes: The Autobiography of Riché Richardson”(1994)

“Daughters of Africa.” From the Collection of Claire Milligan(1993). Large, multi-panel art quilt on which this series is based was completed in the summer of 1993.

“Daughters of Africa.” Appliqué work by Riché Richardson and quilting by Georgette Norman.
From the Collection of Georgette Norman (1993).

Africa Quilt (1995)

Africa Quilt (1995)

“JoAnn Richardson: School Days.” First painted art quilt that launched the “Portraits” art quilt project (1999)

*A quilted “Daughters of Africa” potholder and a Christmas stocking featuring a Christmas tree and snowman were also produced during the mid-1990s phase, though no art quilts were produced between 1996 and 1998

From Portraits II Family Series, Including Baby and Children, Education, Debutante and Self-Portrait Series, Including Various Installation-Style Works with Light and Sound Technology Components (29 Works)

“Debutante Daddy: Mr. Joe Richardson Presenting Daughter Pamela Richardson As a Debutante in National Sorority of Phi Delta Kappa, Inc., Beta Beta Chapter Cotillion, Garrett Coliseum, Montgomery, Alabama, April 10, 1976” (Joe Richardson, b. July 11, 1915 and Commemorating 100 Years in 2015) (Debutante Series). Installation-style panel 1 of 3. Composition 2011-2014.

“Debutante Pamela Richardson Presented by Father, Mr. Joe Richardson, in National Sorority of Phi Delta Kappa, Inc., Beta Beta Chapter Cotillion, Garrett Coliseum, Montgomery, Alabama, April 10, 1976” (Debutante Series). Installation-style panel 2 of 3. Composition 2011-2014.

“Debutante Mama: Mrs. Emma Lou Jenkins Richardson, Mother of Pamela Richardson in National Sorority of Phi Delta Kappa Debutante Cotillion, Garrett Coliseum, Montgomery, Alabama, April 10, 1976” (Debutante Series). Installation-style panel 3 of 3. Composition 2011-2014.

Top hat, white-tipped cane, white pedestal column and white floral bouquet positioned at left adjacent to panel 1. A segment from the original newspaper article related to the cotillion positioned right of panel 3. Special thanks to Pamela R. Garrett for developing the flower bouquet designs and to Kim Salter at Evening Out Formal Wear in Montgomery, Alabama for providing the cane featured in the installation.

The main song in the digital soundtrack component of this debutante quilt installation is Barbara Streisand’s “The Way We Were”(1976). Among other songs in rotation are Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely,” The Carpenters’ “Close to You” and “We’ve Only Just Begun,” Fred Astaire’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together,” Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Shining Star” and The Chordettes’ “Mr. Sandman.” Installation also includes one-light spotlight beam technology shining on center panel. Special thanks to Daniel Neil for collaborating on sound and light technology features of this art quilt installation.

“Jo Ann and ‘Junior Man’ II, or, ‘Butler’ and ‘Jenny’: Cowboys at Christmas.” Installation-style quilt. Special Thanks to T-Shirt Express for Screen Printing Background Photographs. Dedicated to Nancy Hodge Richardson, Murray Richardson, and Sarah and Clinton Carson. Special thanks to Joanne Richardson for preparing the fringe on the outfits in this art quilt installation. Composition 2009-2015.

“Pam as Booker T. Washington May Day Queen.” Original newspaper article related to the festivities is positioned on the wall. Composition 2009-2014.

“Riché Deianne Richardson as Jr. Gayfer Girl in 1983 at Age 11 and Dressed for the Group Photo, the First Event after Graduation from Poise-Charm Classes at Gayfers Department Store (formerly Montgomery Fair) in Montgomery Mall"(Family Series, Education Series, and Self-Portrait Series). Special Thanks to T-Shirt Express for the T-Shirt Design and Production.
Composition 2012-13.

“’Head and Shoulders Knees and Toes!’: Keri Diamond Smith and Megan Chereé Smith, School Days at St. John-Resurrection"(Family Series, Education Series) Installation-style quilt. Also features sound of children’s song “Head and Shoulders Knees and Toes.” Special thanks to Daniel Neil for collaborating on sound technology features of this art quilt installation. Composition 2005-12.

“Riché Deianne Richardson: Profile in the State of Alabama” (Self-Portrait). Composition 2011-2014.

Political Series

“Obama Time: Always (Congratulations, Mr. President!)” (Political Series). Composition 2008-09.

“The Magnificent Michelle Obama, Our First Lady: ‘Strength and Honor are Her Clothing’(Proverbs 31: 25)”(Political Series). Composition 2009.

“Mary McLeod Bethune: One of America’s Greatest Sweethearts and the World’s Best Leaders.” Composition 2012-2014.

"Clarence Thomas’s High Tech Lynching?: Inferior Court Justice to Be"(Political Series). Composition 2002-12.

"Condoleezza Rice: From Birmingham to the White House" (Alabama Women Series, Political Series). Composition 2011- 2012.

“The Journey of Condoleezza Rice.” Composition 2012.

“’W’: President George W. Bush, #43.” Composition 2013-14.

Civil Rights Movement: The Montgomery Bus Boycott Series

“Rosa Parks, Whose ‘No’ in 1955 Launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Was Heard Around the World”(Commemorating 100 Years, 1913-2013) (Civil Rights Movement Series, Black History Series, and Alabama Women Series). Dedicated to Georgette Norman. Composition 2006-12.

“Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: From the Montgomery Bus Boycott to a Dream for America” (Black History Series). Composition 2012-2014.

“E.D. Nixon: Father of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Civil Rights Movement” (Black History Series) In Memory of E.D. Nixon, Jr., a.k.a. “Nick LaTour.” Dedicated to Alma Burton Johnson. Composition 2012-13.

Paris Series

“James Baldwin: From Harlem to Paris” (African American Literature Series). Composition 2012-2014.

“’Richard Wright: From Mississippi to Paris” (African American Literature Series). Composition 2012-2014.

“Audrey Tautou as Amélie.” Composition 2011.

Hollywood Series

“Charleston's Finest: Clark Gable as Rhett Butler"(Gone with the Wind Series). Special thanks to Daniel Neil for collaborating on sound technology features of this art quilt installation. (Panel 3 of 3). Composition 2006-12.

“Dorothy Dandridge Playing Carmen Jones” Installation-style quilt. Special thanks to Daniel Neil for collaborating on sound technology features of this art quilt installation. Composition 2012-2014.

“I Wanted to Really Build Something: To Sidney Poitier with Love.” Composition 2012-2014.

“The Marvelous Marilyn Monroe.” Installation-style quilt. Special thanks to Daniel Neil for collaborating on sound technology features of this art quilt installation. Composition 2011 -2014.

Black History Series

“Daughter of Africa, Mother of African American Literature, Another American Revolution” (Black History Series, African American Literature Series, and New Daughters of Africa Series). Dedicated to Honorée Jeffers. Composition 2010-12.

“The Great Abolitionist Frederick Douglass: ‘I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday’; Birthday Unknown but Celebrated February 14” (Black History Series) Dedicated to Class of 2009, Suger High School, Saint-Denis in Paris, France. Installation-style quilt. Includes display of a broken cowhide whip. Composition 2010-11.

“Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison”(African American Literature Series). Composition 2010.

“The Vision of W.E.B. Du Bois.” Composition 2012-2014.

Portraits from Montgomery to Paris(2008) (19 Works)

From Family Series, Including Wedding, Graduation/Education, and Debutante Series, Three Installations, and Artist Self Portraits

"Sunday Afternoon on Palafox Street in Pensacola, Florida during WWII: Emma Lou
Jenkins Richardson.” Composition 1999-00.

“Sunday Afternoon on Palafox Street in Pensacola, Florida during WWII: Joe Richardson.” Composition 2000-01.

"JoAnn and 'Junior Man': Easter Sunday, Montgomery, Alabama, 1954"(Installation). Composition 2001-04.

"Pam's Graduation from Kindergarten at Mrs. Drake's"(Installation). Composition 2005-08.

"JoAnn Richardson: Graduation Picture at Booker Washington High School." Composition 2005-06.

"Joseph Richardson: Graduation Picture at Booker Washington High School.” Composition 2006-07

"Pamela Richardson: Graduation Picture at Jefferson Davis High School." Composition 2005-08.

"The Honeymooners: Celebrating 47 Years: Emma Richardson." Composition 2005-06.

"The Honeymooners: Celebrating 47 Years: Joe Richardson." Composition 2005-08.

“Riché Deianne Richardson: Graduation Picture at St. Jude Educational Institute of 'The City of St. Jude.”' (The Last Camping Place for Selma-to-Montgomery Marchers in 1965) (Self-Portrait). Special Thanks to Dr. Kelly Gianetti for Sterilized Orthodontic Appliances. Composition 2005-06.

“Riché Deianne Richardson, Age 17: Debutante Cotillion Program Portrait, 1989." (Self-Portrait). Composition 2006-08.

"Keri Diamond Smith, Age 17: Debutante Cotillion Program Portrait, 2004." Composition 2006-08.

"Megan Chereé Smith, Age 17: Debutante Cotillion Program Portrait, 2006." Composition 2006-08.

From Paris Series

"Playing Venus Hot to Trot?: Josephine Baker"(Commemorating 100 years, 1906-2006). Composition 2001-05.

"Remembering a Dutiful Daughter: Simone de Beauvoir" (Commemorating 100 years, 1908-2008). Composition 2004-07.

From Political Series

"The Ties that Bind: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy." Composition 2002-04.

"A Tie, Too?": Malcolm X." Composition 2002-04.

From Hollywood Series

"Playing 'Mammy': Not Hattie McDaniel!" Composition 2006-08.

"Sweet Scarlett?: Vivien Leigh Playing Southern Belle." Composition 2006-08.

The "Portraits" Project

2014-01-21T13:11:00.000-08:00

Emma Jenkins Richardson, My Grandmother, while living in Pensacola, Florida during WW II

Joe Richardson, My Grandfather, while living in Pensacola, FL, During WW II

My grandmother, Emma Jenkins Richardson

JoAnn/Joanne Richardson, My Mother at uncle and aunt's house in Montgomery, Alabama

My Mother as a baby with my grandmother at uncle and aunt's house.

My mother as a baby with my grandfather at uncle and aunt's house.

My mother as a baby

My mother

My mother JoAnn/Joanne and uncle, Joseph Richardson, as children in 1955

My mother dressed for a program and parade in Montgomery in the 1950s

My mother and uncle at Christmas in Montgomery in the 1950s

My mother and uncle at Christmas in the 1950s

My mother at age 10

My uncle, Joseph Richardson, as May Day King at Booker T. Washington Elementary in Montgomery, with the Queen, a girl named Mary, and baby sister Pam

My mother as First Attendant to May Day Queen at her school

My aunt, Pamela Richardson, as a toddler with her doll and stuffed animal at Christmas

My aunt Pam with her doll at Christmas

My grandmother, Emma Jenkins Richardson, with my mother and aunt Pam

My aunt Pam's graduation from kindergarten

My aunt, Pamela Richardson, as May Day Queen at Booker T. Washington Elementary

Clipping from the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper featuring my aunt as May Day Queen at BTW

My Mother's high school graduation picture (BTW)

My uncle's high school graduation picture (BTW)

My aunt's high school graduation picture (Jeff Davis)

My high school graduation picture (St. Jude Educational Institute)

My debutante photo from the program booklet, April, 1989

My cousin Keri Smith's debutante photo from the program booklet, April, 2004

My cousin Megan Smith's debutante photo from the program booklet, April, 2006

Images of my grandparents in Pensacola, Florida during WWII in the 1940s, as well as various vintage family photos taken in Montgomery, Alabama beginning in the 1950s that inspired my Portraits Project in Art quilting. The images of my mother and aunt from the 1950s and 1960s with the black dolls that my grandmother would buy them growing up also stand out to me in our family photo collection; also see the post on this blog on "Black Debutantes" for more family photos that have helped to inspire this exhibition.

Various Images of my grandparents in Pensacola, Florida during WWII in the 1940s, as well as various vintage family photos taken in Montgomery, Alabama beginning in the 1950s that inspired my Portraits Project in Art quilting

The Portraits Project

My second solo art quilt exhibition entitled “Portraits II: From Montgomery to Paris” has been very exciting to develop as a follow-up to my first, “Portraits from Montgomery to Paris,” which debuted at Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama July-September 2008 and was also featured at the Carol Tatkon Center Art Gallery at Cornell University in 2011. Four pieces from this show were also featured at the Mairie du 5e in Paris, and two at the U.S. Ambassador’s Residence in the city when I was invited to the city as a “Cultural Envoy” by the U.S. Embassy in France for the Paris opening of its national quilt exhibition, “Un Patchwork de Cultures,” under the sponsorship of a grant from the U.S. Department of State in its Speaker Series. Selected works from this show have also been featured in several other places, including a 2009 exhibition on “Black Debutantes” at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.

The body of quilts from “Portraits” are the subject of the short film by Anne Crémieux and Géraldine Chouard entitled “A Portrait of the Artist”(2008), which was shot on location in Paris, France and highlighted an interview with the scholar Patricia A. Turner. Pat Turner also discusses the “Portraits” project in her book Crafted Lives: Stories and Studies of African American Quilters. Quilts from “Portraits” are also featured in Lauren Cross’s film The Skin Quilt Project (2010).

Already, works from “Portraits II” have been in circulation. In January 2009, the very first quilt produced on the road to this new show, which features President Obama, was first presented in Paris, France prior to the inauguration in the U.S. and went on to appear in Roland Freeman’s “Quilts for Obama” at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. for most of that year. It is also featured on the commemorative poster for this monumental quilt exhibition, which went into two encores, including a final encore on request of the Congressional Black Caucus and the mayor of Washington, D.C. My quilt featuring Michelle Obama was added to the final encore of “Quilts for Obama" that began in September 2009. The Obama quilts that led off “Portraits II,” as well as those featuring Frederick Douglass and Toni Morrison, were also featured in the exhibition at Cornell University at the Carol Tatkon Center Art Gallery. The production network for “Portraits II” is hard at work and very excited about the new show opening in January, 2015 and aims for it to be featured in several venues.

“Portraits” included four series in all, including “Family,” “Paris,” “Political” and “Hollywood.” Smaller series within the “Family Series” include series entitled “Wedding,” “Baby,” “Self-Portrait,” “Education,” and “Debutante.” Portraits II continues to develop all of the foundational series and incorporates several more, including “Black History,” “African American Literature,” “Alabama Women,” and new versions of “Daughters of Africa” and “Delta,” which I began in the early 1990s. The “Portraits” project recalls May Day celebrations in Montgomery, Alabama dating back to the 1950s, as well as Easter parades, school programs, and birthday celebrations. It recreates debutante portraits from the 1970s to the 2000s. In the process, it captures a side of black life, particularly in the U.S. South, less frequently discussed. As the curator Georgette Norman describes “Portraits” in the 2008 catalog for the show at Rosa Parks Museum, it “draws on aspects of Montgomery and Civil Rights history, but focuses on family showing the dignity and beauty that always existed . . . Portraits
. . . captures in new form family photos and memories, and also treats political and cultural figures from Martin Luther King to Scarlett O’Hara.“

The words “new form” well speak to the approach that I take to quilting, as do my comments at the opening of the film “A Portrait of the Artist,” which mention my goal of “pushing quilting as far as I can, so that even the question, ‘what is a quilt,’ is ultimately raised.” All of my quilts usually include at least one feature that is challenging to pull off; I refer to them as “special effects.” I once made a casual and offhand list of the eclectic features that constitute my mixed-media quilting style above and beyond the foundational fabrics. They include hats, jewelry, shoes, fingernails, ribbons, eyelashes, synthetic hair, orthodontic braces, buttons, safety pins, boas, fruit, beading, flowers, glasses, mirrors, and ties, among others. The quilts for the new show expand the body of special effects that I incorporate and take my architectural “three-dimensional” quilting style and the notion of the “built quilt” in some new and quite exciting directions. I draw all of the images on my quilts by hand and paint them with fabric or acrylic paints; I do all of the quilting by hand.
Many people describe them as “quilts unlike any I have ever seen before.” Below is a comprehensive listing of the works that so far make up my multi-year “Portraits” project in art quilting, which I began in 1999 and by the time that it culminates in 2015, will have been developing for over 15 years.

Portraits II: From Montgomery to Paris (2015)

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from Family Series #2, Including Baby and Children, Education, Debutante and Self-Portrait Series, Including Various Installation-style Works

“Debutante Daddy: Joe Richardson Presenting Daughter Pamela Richardson As a Debutante in National Sorority of Phi Delta Kappa, Inc., Beta Beta Chapter Cotillion, Garrett Coliseum, Montgomery, Alabama, April 10, 1976” (Joe Richardson, b. July 11, 1915 and Commemorating 100 Years in 2015) (Debutante Series). Installation-style panel 1 of 3 (Composition 2011-2014)

“Debutante Pamela Richardson Presented by Father, Joe Richardson, in National Sorority of Phi Delta Kappa, Inc., Beta Beta Chapter Cotillion, Garrett Coliseum, Montgomery, Alabama, April 10, 1976” (Debutante Series) Installation-style panel 2 of 3 (Composition 2011-2014)

“Debutante Mama: Emma Richardson, Mother of Pamela Richardson in National Sorority of Phi Delta Kappa Debutante Cotillion, Garrett Coliseum, Montgomery Alabama, April 10, 1976” (Debutante Series). Installation-style panel 3 of 3 (Composition 2011-2014)

“Jo Ann and ‘Junior Man’ II: Cowboys at Christmas.” Installation-style quilt
Special Thanks to T-Shirt Express for Screenprinting Background Photographs (Composition 2009-2014)

“Pam as Booker T. Washington May Day Queen” (Composition 2009-2014)

“Riché Deianne Richardson as Jr. Gayfer Girl in 1983 at Age 11 and Dressed for the Group Photo, the First Event after Graduation from Poise-Charm Classes at Gayfers Department Store (formerly Montgomery Fair) in Montgomery Mall"(Family Series, Education Series, Self-Portrait Series) (Composition 2012-13) Special Thanks to T-Shirt Express for the T-Shirt Design and Production

“’Head and Shoulders Knees and Toes!’: Keri Diamond Smith and Megan Chereé Smith, School Days at St. John-Resurrection"(Family Series, Education Series)
Installation-style quilt (Composition 2005-12)

“Riché Deianne Richardson: Profile in the State of Alabama” (Self-Portrait) (2011-2014)

Political Series

“Obama Time: Always (Congratulations, Mr. President!)” (Composition 2008-09)

“The Magnificent Michelle Obama, Our First Lady: ‘Strength and Honor are Her Clothing’(Proverbs 31: 25)”(Political Series) (Composition 2009)

“Mary McLeod Bethune: One of America’s Greatest Sweethearts and the World’s Best Leaders”(Composition 2012-2014)

"Clarence Thomas’s High Tech Lynching?: Inferior Court Justice to Be"(Political Series) (Composition 2002-12)

"Condoleezza Rice: From Birmingham to the White House" (Alabama Women Series, Political Series) (Composition 2011- 2012)

“The Journey of Condoleezza Rice”(2012)

“’W’: President George W. Bush, #43”

Civil Rights Movement: The Montgomery Bus Boycott Series

“Rosa Parks, Whose ‘No’ in 1955 Launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Was Heard Around the World”(Commemorating 100 Years, 1913-2013) (Civil Rights Movement Series, Black History Series, Alabama Women Series). Dedicated to Georgette Norman (Composition 2006-12)

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: From the Montgomery Bus Boycott to a Dream for America” (Also Black History Series) (Composition 2012-2014)

“E.D. Nixon: Father of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Civil Rights Movement” (Black History Series) In Memory of E.D. Nixon, Jr., a.k.a. “Nick LaTour” (Composition 2012-13)

Paris Series

“James Baldwin: From Harlem to Paris” (African American Literature Series) (Composition 2012-2014 )

“’Richard Wright: From Mississippi to Paris (African American Literature Series) (Composition 2012-2014)

“Audrey Tautou as Amélie”(Composition 2011)

Hollywood Series

“Charleston's Finest: Clark Gable as Rhett Butler" (Composition 2006-12)

“Dorothy Dandridge Playing Carmen Jones” Installation-style quilt
(Composition 2012-2014)

“I Wanted to Really Build Something: To Sidney Poitier with Love” (Composition 2012-2014)

“The Marvelous Marilyn Monroe” Installation-style quilt (Composition 2011 -2014)

Black History Series

“Daughter of Africa, Mother of African American Literature, Another American Revolution” (Black History Series, African American Literature Series, & New Daughters of Africa Series). Dedicated to Honorée Jeffers (Composition 2010-12)

“The Great Abolitionist Frederick Douglass: ‘I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday’; Birthday Unknown but Celebrated February 14” (Black History Series) Dedicated to Class of 2009, Suger High School, Saint-Denis in Paris, France Installation-style quilt (Composition 2010-11)

“Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison”(African American Literature Series) (Composition 2010)

“The Vision of W.E.B. Du Bois”(Composition 2012-2014)

Portraits from Montgomery to Paris(2008)

from Family Series #1, Including Wedding, Graduation/Education, and Debutante Series, Three Installations, and Artist Self Portraits

"Sunday Afternoon on Palafox Street in Pensacola, Florida during WWII": Emma Lue
Jenkins Richardson (Composition 1999-00)

Sunday Afternoon on Palafox Street in Pensacola, Florida during WWII: Joe Richardson (Composition 2000-01)

"JoAnn and 'Junior Man': Easter Sunday, Montgomery, Alabama, 1954"(Installation)(Composition 2001-04)

"Pam's Graduation from Kindergarten at Mrs. Drake's"(Installation) (Composition 2005-08)

" JoAnn Richardson: Graduation Picture at Booker Washington High School"(Composition 2005-06)

"Joseph Richardson: Graduation Picture at Booker Washington High School"(Composition 2006-07)

"Pamela Richardson: Graduation Picture at Jefferson Davis High School"(Composition 2005-08)

"The Honeymooners: Celebrating 47 Years: Emma Richardson"(Composition 2005-06)

"The Honeymooners: Celebrating 47 Years: Joe Richardson" (Composition 2005-08)

Riché Deianne Richardson: Graduation Picture at St. Jude Educational Institute of 'The City of St. Jude' (The Last Camping Place for Selma-to-Montgomery Marchers in 1965) Self-Portrait (Composition period. Special Thanks to Dr. Kelly Gianetti for Sterilized Orthodontic Appliances (Composition 2005-06)

Riché Deianne Richardson, Age 17: Debutante Cotillion Program Portrait, 1989" Self-Portrait (Composition 2006-08)

"Keri Diamond Smith, Age 17: Debutante Cotillion Program Portrait, 2004"(Composition 2006-08)

"Megan Chereé Smith, Age 17: Debutante Cotillion Program Portrait, 2006"(Composition 2006-08)

from Paris Series #1

"Playing Venus Hot to Trot?: Josephine Baker"(Commemorating 100 years, 1906-2006)(Composition 2001-05)

"Remembering a Dutiful Daughter: Simone de Beauvoir" (Commemorating 100 years, 1908-2008)(Composition 2004-07)

from Political Series #1

"The Ties that Bind: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy"(Composition 2002-04)

"A Tie, Too?": Malcolm X" (Composition 2002-04)

from Hollywood Series # 1

"Playing 'Mammy': Not Hattie McDaniel!"(Composition 2006-08)

"Sweet Scarlett?: Vivien Leigh Playing Southern Belle"(Composition 2006-08)

Early Work Retrospective

Soft-sculpture doll honoring purple uniform of Alabama Association of Federated Youth Clubs, completed in 1987 at age 16 (Second place prize winner in annual state crafts completion)

Soft –sculpture doll made in 1989 at age 18 to decorate dormitory room at Spelman College freshman year

“Delta Love”(first art quilt produced in 1992 as a new member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. in Spelman College’s Eta Kappa Chapter; this organization also first exhibited Riché Richardson’s art when featuring this piece in an exhibition on Spelman’s campus in 1993)

“My Family Quilt”(1993)

“Destiny’s Child: Borrowed Robes”(1994)

“Daughter’s of Africa”(1993)

Africa Quilt (1995)

Africa Quilt (1995)

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Reflections on Roots and the Remake

2013-11-16T22:16:00.000-08:00

Roots taught me about the meaning of race in America. I remember watching Roots nightly with my entire family the week that it aired on television in January, 1977 and was five at the time. The plight of Kunta Kinte confused me and made a profound impact on me from the very beginning. I remember asking my mother questions such as, “Why does he look so sad?” and having her explain that he had been kidnapped and taken from his home and family, a horrifying thought to me. When I asked her “Why can’t he go home?” she explained that he couldn’t because his home was across the ocean. Similarly, I remember being so upset and angered by the beating scene in which he refused to accept the name “Toby” that I rolled up a section of a newspaper and used it to “beat” the open door of my grandparent’s bedroom as the family continued to watch. From that point on, I totally got it, didn’t need to ask my mother any more questions, and had instinctively understood what race meant in the U.S., including the devalued status of African Americans. In my childhood, I very much experienced Roots as the primary teaching tool that clarified for me the meaning of race and slavery in this nation’s history.

After reading Roots and Queen, my uncle made detailed family trees for both productions, and also underscored Alex Haley’s family’s linkages to Ithaca and Cornell when I first arrived here. Over the holidays in 2012, the BET Network’s airing of Roots and Queen, which are both based on the family histories of Alex Haley, introduced these works to a new generation and underscored their continuing relevance. I was thankful to witness their powerful impact on two of my cousins, young women who are in their twenties, who were seeing them for the first time. The original Roots is a canonical work in television history and will be tough to follow. Remaking it for more contemporary audiences in a digital age and with newer resources and techniques, including new technologies that are now available for the production process, will be valuable. For example, the makeup techniques for aging characters were definitely passable but were not very advanced in the original television series. I will always cherish the original, but it will be interesting to see the new production and how it measures up.

Roots opened the door to studies of African American genealogy in which many African Americans are now increasingly invested. In recent years, this movement has been spearheaded by the work of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at Harvard. Within the first half hour of joining Ancestry.com in 2006, we were able to trace our ancestry back to my great, great, great grandfather born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1795 and discovered the twin dynasty he originated and that had passed down the names “Isic” and “Ben” among the twin boys across several generations. I learned this and exclaimed that “It’s a story as great as Roots!” For the births of these twins were obviously cherished and anticipated from generation to generation. We have now traced our roots as far back as 1758. Some members of my family, like my grandmother, have also taken the 23&Me and Ancestry.com genealogy tests.

The Homework of Art

2013-09-08T16:19:00.001-07:00

By Riché Richardson

I originally drafted this editorial piece last December on request from a regional business magazine, which focuses on my perspective as an artist from a business standpoint and as a business woman.

I once described myself as a person who mainly works as a university professor and moonlights as an artist. My weekday hours are dedicated to meeting the demands of my work as a professional in academia where the goal is excelling in the primary areas of evaluation and review, which include research, teaching and service. Even during periodic stretches of time on sabbatical leave when teaching and service are not expectations, writing assumes center stage and consumes a lot time. Yet, because having a space to nurture interests unrelated to my academic agenda is crucial, I have had to carve out time to also be productive as an artist. Maintaining a well-equipped home-based art studio and doing my work as an artist effectively from the space of home is a must.

I made my first mixed-media appliqué art quilt as a senior at Spelman College in 1992. I continued to make art quilts as a graduate student in the 1990s at Duke University and when I joined the faculty in the University of California system. In California, my art studio was a corner in my living room. Because of my steady pace and rhythm of art production, by the time that I went up for tenure in 2004, I had also developed a body of art work and was invited by the director Georgette Norman to do my first solo show at Troy University's Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama in 2008. My quilt portraits project is grounded in family quilts featuring my grandparents, Emma Jenkins Richardson and Joe Richardson, during their years of living in Florida during World War II.

Since 2008, I have been on the faculty at Cornell University where I have continued to excel as a professor. I have also begun to establish a reputation as an art quilter whose work has been documented in books and films. It has appeared in national exhibitions from “Un Patchwork de Cultures” in France to “Quilts for Obama” at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. The former opportunity entailed my being brought to Paris in 2009 under the auspices of a grant from the U.S. Department of State as a Cultural Envoy of the U.S. Embassy in France in its “Speaker Series,” and honored with a talk, exhibition, film screening and reception at the U.S. Ambassador’s Residence in tandem with the exhibition’s Paris opening.

I have been able to produce a substantial body of quilts by working steadily for at least two hours primarily on Sundays after church. I first established this pace and rhythm when I spent that window of time reading the Bible in a year as a graduate student. My work sometimes spills over into other periods during the weekend, or inflects some weekdays during my summers off. My art studio makes my art projects accessible and allows me to maximize my work time.

As my art project developed and on the road to my first solo show, I released several complimentary print cards primarily for the purpose educational outreach, which also necessitated collaboration with a photographer. When I lived in California, the photographer for my first show, Keith Stevenson, would periodically visit my high rise condominium apartment in downtown Sacramento and shoot my quilts on the balcony, which was another way in which the work related to my quilts unfolded at home. We scheduled a couple of photo shoots at his apartment in Berkeley facing the Golden Gate Bridge. We even did a public photo shoot on the campus where I worked, UC Davis, during Black Family Weekend and permitted film students to document it. The print cards are fun to produce and have received an enthusiastic response, which makes me optimistic about possibilities for seeking a deal to market, distribute and sell them for profit, along with other merchandise, for my unique quilt portraits. My goal is also to open my own art studio and gallery for purposes of community outreach, and to establish an art production company that tithes 20% of any profits to support community interests. Quilters such as Carolyn Mazloomi and Kyra Hicks are among the people who inspire me in the field. Similarly, I admire Faith Ringgold for her famed quilts and wise business example.

So far, the exposure that I have received as an artist has blessedly come without even working with a publicist. Yet my project could not have ever reached the success that it has reached at this point without the contributions of a committed production network whose work has also overlapped and been highly collaborative. Patricia A. Turner’s regular trips to my apartment in California to document my work as a quilter for her book first introduced me to Keith’s photography and her interviews established the groundwork for my later appearances in documentary films. Filmmakers Anne Crémieux and Géraldine Chouard showcased Keith’s photography in their film about my art. I have learned a lot from witnessing their expertise in film and photography. I have also learned by working with various curators.

Over time, as my art career has developed, it has definitely also been necessary to do a lot of homework in building my literacy about business, a must for the wise artist. Since living in California, I have kept a portfolio outlining my business plan in detail, as well as diligent records, so that I will be prepared when the doors open to the right opportunities. In 2007, I had to decline the opportunity to be represented by an art dealer who sells the work of major African American artists, and who wanted me to draw my images on paper instead of fabric, my fundamental and foundational medium. I have faith that I will meet the right one at the right time. In art as in everything, I am confident that walking by faith, keeping my project pure, maintaining its integrity, and making the right choices will guarantee the best and most meaningful kind of success.

Remarks at My Aunt Pamela R-Garrett's Retirement from Kindergarten Teaching

2013-09-08T15:38:00.000-07:00

Photos from the Retirement Celebration Held May 23, 2013

What a beautiful and blessed retirement celebration for my aunt and two other colleagues at Edward T. Davis Elementary School! It was off the chain! Here she is making some wonderful concluding remarks.

My aunt Pam and me at her retirement celebration.

My aunt Pam and her daughters Megan and Keri at the wonderful retirement celebration; all of us are also Delta sorors.

My aunt Pam, her daughter Megan and her son-in-law Patrick. My aunt got one of the best surprises ever when she saw Patrick sitting in the audience, who is currently away in Japan in the Navy.

Her daughters Megan and Keri Smith and Megan's husband Patrick at my aunt's beautiful retirement celebration. Keri did an outstanding dance as part of the program that got a standing ovation, and I was also honored to be on the program to do a tribute to my aunt.

Video of Keri's Liturgical Dance to "Let the Church Say Amen"

Remarks for Pamela R. Garrett's Retirement Celebration

I am overjoyed to have the opportunity today to stand up and give a salute to my aunt, Mrs. Pamela Garret, alongside her two other honored colleagues, for a remarkable career teaching career. It is so gratifying to see her culminate a journey that I witnessed from the time that it began. I am thankful to be here today with other family members and friends to support her, and also bring greetings from my grandmother and her mother, Mrs. Emma Richardson. I know and speak firsthand about how proud even relatives no longer here with us would be of the outstanding teacher she has been in her career, and to see her reach this day, beginning with my grandfather and her father, Joe Richardson. It has meant so much to me throughout my life to have my aunt as an example walking along the road a bit ahead, and setting such a remarkable example both as a woman and professional.

I personally watched her evolve from the Easy Bake oven and her sewing projects that filled so much of her time during her adolescent years, to her daily lesson plans and related artistic projects for her classroom. It was as if the whole floor was covered with alphabets in every conceivable color motif, and the stream of laminates was endless. I remember my amazement as she’d be busy at work cutting out what seemed to be endless reams of laminated materials and designing games, and know the hard work that her job requires on so many fronts, year in and year out. Consistently, she has given her students her very best, working late into the night.

I know that the privilege of having her example has made all the difference in my life, and inspired and motivated me as I have pursued my interests as a scholar and artist. I cannot even begin to describe all of the ways in which my aunt has supported the project of my education over the years. She has consistently been there for me. I love and appreciate her for that, and respect and admire her as a professional. She does for me in my life now what she has always done. Her continuing commitment to her students and deep devotion to what she does helped to set the achievement bar high for me from the very beginning. She is the kind of kindergarten teacher I have wished a thousand times I’d had myself, and the kind that I’d want for a child of my own.

One day around her year 26, I saw her one morning looking so energetic as she began the day with such beautiful fashion flair to boot, and it was an image that gave me the hope that I, too, would be able to continue to meet my job with that level of commitment even after so many years, while also redoubling my commitment to serving youth both inside and outside of the classroom as she has throughout her career that has been complemented by an outstanding record of community service.

A few weeks ago, my hairdresser was having a concern with one of her children at school, and I was very inspired that when I consulted my aunt Pam, she took the time on a busy afternoon, zoned in on the problem with the precision of a surgeon, and gave such pointed advice about the matter, which was resolved well as a result of the suggestions I was able to pass along. That moment further attested to what a master teacher she is. I am heartened by how many of her former students she still encounters when out and about, and the fondness that they demonstrate for her. In her epic teaching career, students have known her as Miss Richardson, Mrs. Smith, and now Mrs. Garrett. All I can say is, I am thankful, honored and privileged to have been a witness of her extraordinary teaching career since its beginning. I congratulate and salute you on behalf of our nearest and dearest loved ones. Thanks to God for everything that you have achieved. It is all to His glory and purpose. Peace, prayers, and many blessings in all you do as you continue on your beautiful journey.

Copy of My Letter of Support for Pam's Nomination for "Alabama Teacher of the Year" a Few Years Ago

PERSONAL LETTER OF SUPPORT FOR PAMELA RICHARDSON-SMITH

I write as an extra voice among her official recommendations to support enthusiastically Pamela Richardson-Smith's selection as "Alabama's Teacher of the Year." I am her niece, and write just to say that Pam is truly one of the best educators that I have seen. I can attest to the big difference that she has made in my life through her professional work in education. I am now a tenured associate professor at the University of California Davis, the author of a book, co-editor of a university press book series at the University of Georgia Press entitled "The New Southern Studies," and an executive committee member in the Southern Literature Discussion Group and the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. I am also an emerging quilt artist. That I have had such a journey thus far has been possible in part, I think, because I have been able to observe my aunt's remarkable example as an educator throughout my life, beginning when I was a child. She is one of the best role models that I have ever had, and one of the earliest people I saw whose example inspired me to strive for success. She is deeply committed to education, and has been true to that mission for many years, to the point of becoming a master teacher. Pam approaches teaching, as everything, with a lot of flair and originality. She is intelligent, she has an incredible sense of humor and wit, she has a kind heart, and she is sincere. She is a deserving and ideal candidate for the award "Alabama Teacher of the Year," and definitely most deserving.

Charity as they say, begins at home, and Pam truly helped me in my life like few people in this world ever have helped me, or would help me. She supported me, sacrificed for me, and encouraged my development even before she had children of her own. As a child, I inherited her Barbie dolls. In hindsight, I realize that I began to inherit things back then from her that were a lot more valuable, and that have made a tremendous difference in my life. I gained my first very exposure to the university classroom at the age of five when she took me to a class one day with her at Alabama State. I could not have ever imagined, as I sat in that lecture hall, that that day with her as a child would set a foundation for the profession that I would pursue years later. In general, it was clear, from my early impressions, that our family expected a lot from Pam and wanted her to do well and become a success.

There is so much that I can say about what I have witnessed from my own standpoint in observing Pam's journey as an educator. I remember her excitement as she began her practice teaching. I was there at the beginning as a child watching her daily as she made projects for her classroom. I personally watched her evolve from the Easy Bake oven and her sewing projects that filled so much of her time during her adolescent years, to her daily lesson plans and related artistic projects for her classroom. That they were oftentimes projects that she regarded as too sacred for my play made me all the more curious about them. It was as if our whole floor was covered with alphabets in every conceivable color motif, and the stream of laminates was endless. Looking through her wealth of catalogs filled with educational supplies as a third grader showed me what was possible in terms of teaching and learning, and made me hungry for those things. The kind of energy and care that I witnessed her bring to creating an inspiring classroom for her students is still there now, and the projects have never stopped. Two years, ago, I saw her leaving the house one morning on one of my visits home, with such pep in her step, such a sense of purpose and mission, and dressed so well. I thought it amazing that anyone, after 27 years in a field, could meet it with such energy and excitement, and hoped that I would be able to meet my own job with that same level of energy and vigor after so many years. Her career has not been all sunshine and roses, however. I have seen her deal with more challenging issues in her teaching, such as when she has encountered students who were victims of abuse, with grace, care and consideration. She does her job with care and love from year to year. She has been the best possible steward of it over the years.

I cannot even begin to describe all of the ways in which Pam has supported the project of my education over the years. On her tight schedule as an elementary school teacher, just as she was beginning her career, she took the time to take me to school daily when my grandparents needed her to do so. She performed this role consistently at several points in my childhood. She used some of the finances of her teaching career to buy me gifts that would educate me, like a Polaroid camera. She was my babysitter every summer. Twice, she consulted the principal and organized and served as the leader for Girl Scout troops at St. John the Baptist Catholic School during my elementary years. This was just one illustration of her commitment to community service that also showed her support for me, for my classmates and friends eagerly participated as she had monthly meetings with us, and organized a range of activities for us, including a trip to Camp Kiwanis. She supported things I did in college, even as she was married and raising two young children. Even now, she continues to offer generous support as a professional. She does for me in my life now what she has always done. She has been there for me, and I love and appreciate her for that.

Her work as a teacher has been a central aspect of her journey to womanhood, and I am proud of the woman that she has become. She is a fine teacher and a true lady. When I began my Ph.D. at Duke University in 1993, I tutored weekly for a year at First Calvary Baptist Church alongside North Carolina Teacher of the Year, the phenomenal Elnora Shields, in the Life Development program sponsored by Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. Week to week, I got a close and visceral understanding of why she won that award. She reminded me of veteran teachers I knew in school who set the bar high and maintained "old school" values even in the midst of vast educational transformations. She also reminded me of Pam.

This recommendation underscores from a personal standpoint what colleagues and community members who support her nomination also believe- that Pam is the best. As one of her former students, albeit at home, I feel privileged to know her, and in part have become who I have become because of her. I give her my enthusiastic recommendation from the award of "Alabama Teacher of the Year."

Sincerely,

Riché Richardson
Associate Professor
English Department
University of California, Davis

Riché Richardson Book Talk #3 on Black Masculinity and the U.S. South (w...

2013-09-06T22:44:00.001-07:00

I am Rachel Jeantal: Travyon’s Friend and a Talk on the Way to Heaven

2013-07-07T12:14:00.002-07:00

By Riché Richardson

For this third blog post on the Trayvon Martin case, to follow up my two from last spring, I want to focus more on black female subjectivity through his friend Rachel Jeantal, to whom he was speaking on the phone before George Zimmerman took his life. Please be forewarned that this is a longer and more personal post than usual and is really more of an essay. By the end, I think readers will understand why. Like a lot of others, I have been concerned about the propaganda that has unfolded about her since her testimony at the Zimmerman trial, propaganda related to her body, voice, demeanor, language and nationalities. I had no problems at all following her verbal-and non-verbal-communication styles, and grasped her phrases like “coulda hear” that the defense seemed intent on distorting and misreading. I loved her interjections of statements such as “you can go,” and “are you listening,” which made me feel all the more that she is entirely sincere. Moreover, the questions raised related to her literacy obscure the chronic neglect in the educational system for black youth like her. The condescending and dismissive readings of her have been very unfair, especially when I think of how problematic and ridiculous it is to make judgments about whose testimonial voices have validity and who is “fit” to represent blackness. Rachel Jeantal, too, is American.

Why is the tendency to ignore the beauty, dignity and voice that she possesses, and to insistently script her in relation to the grotesque instead? Is making fun and joking the only way that some people can deal with the diverse array of black female bodies that might conceivably become legible in the media and attempt to claim voice? When Lolo Jones made fun of Ms. Jeantal and tried to construe her as a caricature by invoking Medea, the moment seemed to recast the interplay between Toni Morrison's characters Maureen Peal and Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye, in which Maureen shouts at Pecola, “I am cute!” Ms. Jones seemed to have totally forgotten that article in the NYT last year where it seemed that her public image was being mocked, devalued and under assault, in a way that I found to be offensive and that was also deeply hurtful to see, especially as another black woman. That is the kind of thing that can happen in our hyper-visible media culture, no matter how one sounds or looks. When analyzing the politics surrounding Ms. Jeantal, a character like Sapphire’s Precious, who has been powerfully rendered on screen by the director Lee Daniels, may come to mind when thinking of the issues of literacy, the scrutiny before state power and certain body politics that have emerged, but even that narrative would fail to account for how utterly captivating, mesmerizing and engaging she was as a platonic friend to Trayvon, to the point that he called her and called her; the siren metaphor, in the sense embodied by Angelina Jolie, can only capture Rachel's beauty, attraction, power and distinctly alpha femininity in that sense. And once she offered her testimony, many people were utterly riveted, glued to their television screens, and as captivated by her as Trayvon was!

I feel that it is crucial not to lose sight of the tragedy that this young female high school student has endured, and the courage that she has shown in the face of it. I have also heard a lot of speculations about “the community” that Ms. Jeantal comes from and queries related to “who she is.” Some people are acting as if she comes from an entirely different species, and as if only the most standard and formal uses of English language are acceptable or admissible in public forums, which is ridiculous in a nation as diverse as the U.S. In the end, none of these factors should impact the public’s ability to relate to her testimony. I am astonished by raced and gendered perceptions suggesting that the jury will not like her and would be incapable of hearing and relating to her testimony. I do understand why an almost all-white and female jury could very well end up feeling that way. I can only speak for myself. As an adult black woman who was educated in private school, who grew up in federated clubs and organizations, who was a student leader, who came out as a debutante, who is a Delta, and who earned a Ph.D, I certainly do not feel that any differences are dramatic in a way that would make her too different and other for me to grapple with or to even talk to and comprehend.

As I continue this dialogue, I want to describe an experience that has helped me to understand and identify some with Rachel’s. I had a call before a friend went to heaven, just as Ms. Jeantal did. So I knew where she was coming from in describing all the complex feelings that she had in the aftermath of losing Trayvon, and recognize the sadness, pain and trauma that linger in her. Rachel Jeantal has been invisible, misunderstood and dismissed by some in the course of her testimony about Trayvon. The pain I was experiencing after losing a friend was entirely invisible, unrecognized, unseen and ignored in the context of the university.

On April 11, 2004, Easter Sunday night, a girl friend I had first seen when we were ten and our respective Girl Scout troops shared Trinity Lutheran School as a meeting place, with whom I ate lunch at the same table among our other girl friends every week day of high school for four years, and who had remained in Sacramento where she had been stationed in the military, called to wish me Happy Easter late that evening, around a quarter to nine. It was like her to reach out on holidays. Weeks earlier, I learned that she had even come downtown to visit me on Valentine’s Day back in February, but I had been away in Mississippi at a conference at the time. So the last time I saw her was one August evening in 2003. It was a Saturday evening on which I needed to stay in to do work when she called me about getting together and going to this new popular restaurant/lounge in the tourist area of Old Sacramento, and so she said she’d just come by to chat for a bit. She brought me a set of scented candles as a gift. I wasn’t dressed that evening to go anywhere, and I wasn’t in a mood to put on anything or even go anywhere, but she looked great all dressed up and had also gotten her hair done earlier that day. At one point during her visit, we caught the fireworks from the Sacramento River standing out on the balcony of my apartment, which was three blocks from the capitol. At one point, she asked me if I had a camera. When I said I did, she asked if I’d take her picture in this amazing animal print outfit she was wearing, so I did. All of the cheerleader in her came out in the dynamic pose she struck, with her arms stretched out as far as possible on either side, and a beautiful smile.

With busy schedules, we didn’t always talk very often, and sometimes weeks or months went by between conversations. I had stopped calling and allowed her to do the calling once she moved in with one of her church members months earlier, because I felt uncomfortable and somewhat awkward calling and asking to speak to her at someone else’s home. She may have also called me that Easter Sunday evening because she had seen (i.e. via caller ID) that I’d tried to get in touch with her that Friday afternoon after attending an exciting Stations of the Cross ceremony at the church at St. Francis Terrace in Sacramento, but hadn’t reached her. When I had called that afternoon, someone at the woman’s home where she was staying hung up in my face, which had seemed peculiar. I thought I had the right number written down, but suspected that it must have been wrong. The first thing I did when she called was to ask her if I indeed had the right number, and to read it to her, and she verified it as correct. Then, I asked her if she was still staying there alone, and she said, “No, the lady of the house is back, and her grandson is here.” She mentioned that they’d come from the East Coast two days earlier. I was actually relieved when she said she was no longer there alone, for she’d “house sat” for months for one of her church members far out in a suburb of Sacramento called Antelope, which I’d never been to. She had once invited me to attend a picnic out there for the Fourth of July, but I told her that it wasn’t right for her to take a friend to someone else’s home, and that I’d be all right spending it alone. I did high rise living downtown in Sacramento, and worked in Davis, so life for me basically revolved around commuting by bus back and forth to my job, and doing things in downtown and midtown, or antiquing and going to the mall and fabric stores now and then in Woodland. I’d seen the place on base she lived in when I moved from Davis to Sacramento and we reconnected in person. I had never met the woman she lived with, in spite of my open invitation to my friend to bring her downtown to my apartment sometime for a visit and for lunch if she liked. I wondered why this woman did not seem to be the least bit interested at all in meeting my friend’s friend, especially one who was a university professor and lived downtown. I was sure that my friend had told her all about me and mentioned my invitation. I even mentioned my puzzlement and disbelief over it to my mother when she visited me in California the week before (“I wonder why the woman she lives with is not interested in meeting me?” "That’s so odd."). The woman had lost a daughter our age, 32, the year before, and it was sad when my friend described what happened. At the same time, I had wondered to myself if she was emotionally ready to have another young woman around and so close to that age like my friend, and had inwardly wished that my friend lived somewhere else.

After my friend left the military, I saw the second of her two apartments, which she decorated with a beautiful pink satin bedding ensemble and a leopard sofa cover. Her large CD collection was also nice. She decided to leave the first one because of noisy neighbors who lived above her. It did not help that she was in the parking lot walking toward her car one day and a white woman at her complex just mumbled something and walked up to it and spat on it, which is infuriating whenever I think of it even now. She had left California for a while, but loved living there, and when she returned a few months later, she decided to live at the home of one of her church members and to take her time in settling down again. In that sense, she seemed to be doing everything right.

I was playing my Blind Boys of Alabama CD that Easter Sunday night when she called. We talked about a lot of things. I told her about the mass at St. Francis and the giant wooden cross passed throughout the audience. We talked a while about the recent film The Passion of the Christ, which both of us had seen. I told her that I was going on a trip to Philadelphia soon. “Oh, Philadelphia,” she said. I mentioned that I was preparing for a lecture on Frederick Douglass in my African American literature graduate seminar that Tuesday. She wanted to revisit a point that she said had come up in one of our prior conversations and overviewed aspects of the history of the Roman Empire and Constantine, which reflected her very profound knowledge about church history. She mentioned that one of her dreams was to go on a cruise, and that she’d treat me if I came as well, but I insisted on paying my own way if we went. At one point, I heard something in the background, like a voice, that got her attention; she asked me to hold on and stepped away to check on it, and then returned, but said nothing about what it was. Something stopped me from mentioning anything about the guy I was dating at the time, because for some reason, chatty “girl talk” just seemed out of place that evening, though I’d told her about him several months earlier, including that I was “falling in love,” which she enjoyed hearing after many failures to ever get me to talk about subjects like the kind of wedding I’d like someday. In a phone conversation one Friday evening a few years earlier, when we were in our late twenties, she had once described her fantasy to me of a wedding ceremony with the NBA player Chris Webber, which in retrospect, I am deeply thankful that she shared. She had so many dreams, including marriage and children, and wanted those things like a lot of young women. I had had my crush on him in the early 1990s, but she is, I’m sure, one of the sincerest and most devoted fans that he has ever had. Indeed, she once sent me a beautiful photo of herself posing with Chris Webber at the annual Dinner with the Kings, which she tried to talk me into attending, because she felt strongly that with my tall height, “You could really attract a player!” It was flattering and amusing to have a friend who believed in me that much, and who was always so supportive of all that I was doing in general. For example, when our spiritual mentor (to whom she first introduced me in 1993) asked me where I’d pledged Delta, she proudly recited all the information before I could even say anything. She is one of the best friends that I have ever had, and I cherish that she had even come to regard me as her “best friend.”

Once when we talked in the fall of 2003, she was also reading different books and excitedly told me about various titles she’d been reading, such as Michael Eric Dyson’s most recent book. My dream for her was to see her attend divinity school. She was one of my favorite people with whom to dialogue about spiritual matters. The most serious debate we ever had was one about whether a person could lose their salvation. As one of the best Christians I have ever known in my life, she was adamant that it was possible to be blotted out of the Lamb’s Book of Life. I argued that if that was the case, then Jesus died in vain. That outlook didn’t make sense to me. A few days later, I was surprised to get a letter in the mail from her outlining her perspective, a letter indicating that while she had taken mine into consideration, she could not agree with my argument. I mailed her a copy of Rev. Charles Stanley’s book Eternal Security: Can You Be Sure? When she finished it, she called me to tell me that she understood how sure and secure her Christian salvation is. She had first talked to me about her faith in tenth grade, a time when I had flipped over her belief that women could go to hell for even wearing pants. This moment in her walk, in her acceptance that there is absolutely no way that one can lose the gift of eternal life once one’s faith is professed, was also powerful to witness. And she had professed her faith and become a committed evangelist of it and was witnessing to her peers before most people in our generation were thinking seriously about those matters. She is one of the best and most devoted Christians I have ever met in my life.

I am not sure how long we talked that Easter night, but the Blind Boys CD played twice before we hung up. The next morning, I thought about what she’d said about the cruise, and all the work I needed to do, but decided that I’d make time anyway and go along with her since that was her dream and she seemed to be so excited about it. That Monday evening, I went see my tax preparer. I gave my lecture on Douglass that Tuesday as planned. I remember crossing Capitol Avenue that evening and thinking of things that I still needed to tell my friend, and things I’d forgotten to mention that Sunday. I felt comfortable with my work, and with my life, even happy and thankful for everything, including good friends.

When I got to my apartment, I had a message from our mutual spiritual mentor, who told me to call her. She asked me if I was sitting down, and then told me that my friend had been murdered. I was in disbelief, and told her that was not possible, that I’d talked to her two days ago, at Easter. She described what happened. I looked for any information I could find in the news and saw the brief story about a young woman being stabbed multiple times while taking a bath, and that a suspect was in custody. It was unthinkable and unbelievable.

There didn’t even seem to be a way to classify accurately what had happened. Domestic violence was not an adequate descriptor, in the sense that her life was taken by someone who was mentally ill, whom she did not know and had met just two days earlier. This man in his early twenties was a stranger to her. She'd had no idea that she was in the midst of a person who was unsafe to be around.

I attended her service and spoke during the reflections. The service was beautiful. She would have been deeply touched by how powerfully her home church community celebrated her life, and by the sermon. My remarks described her as a “Saint.” Just as girl friends seemed to, our spiritual mentor’s son and I seemed to have recognized the trace of what she must have experienced in her final moments, and standing there after the service, where we waited as the processional drove off to her burial, he said he wished he could “beat him up.” It struck me as a distinct and specific coping strategy for a guy, for it hit me that doing so had never once occurred to me as a woman over those days. That's not to say I didn't imagine it; I wished I'd been there instead. People tend to perceive me as a nice and sweet person, but she was definitely far sweeter, and didn’t seem to ever get angry at all, so I just wished it had been me instead of her he had come up on like that in that bathroom, like I wished I’d been the one in that parking lot that day. She just quietly wiped it off, but I might not have been able to turn the other cheek as quickly as she did in this situation, and may have even threatened to call the police on the woman, pointed out to her that she’d just left her DNA on my car and said that it could be used as evidence against her if I decided to press charges. When I heard about it, I definitely wished that woman had come up on the type who would have dealt with what she did in that “I KNOW you did NOT just SPIT on MY car!” way.

It was unbelievable that by the time I gave that Douglass lecture, my friend was gone. I was utterly traumatized. It hurt to pass the bench I’d been sitting on after I’d gotten my taxes prepared. To have the conversations play back in my mind, like my Monday morning thoughts about that cruise, or my thoughts as I crossed Capitol Avenue that Tuesday evening without a clue in the world about what had gone on. It pained me to pass the St. Francis apartment building I’d told her about and urged her to consider moving into, because it always made me wonder what could have been. The pain was there whenever I passed by any of the restaurants we’d ever gone to. A tub of water I once dreamed of also registered the trauma. It hurt to even hear Antelope mentioned on the news in traffic reports. The trauma was just that deep. I had no sense of where the area was, and how truly far out it was, until two years later, on a trip to a retreat with the university, when we passed through that area on the way out of the city. He had never been anything but kind to me, in spaces like the lobby and elevator, but I must admit that I felt relieved when I spotted some golf clubs over on the balcony of the African American guy in the apartment next door to me, in the weeks after I’d overheard him and his wife arguing one night. I was left almost shell-shocked, and there were certain words I could not stand to hear, as well as subjects I could not bear talking and hearing about. All I could say to myself was “I don’t know, I just don’t know.” I wondered for a whole summer “how could this have happened?”

Early in the new year, a male friend called me and I seemed so giddy that he asked, “What’s happened to you? Why are you so happy? Did you get a call from Harvard or something? I told him “No, it’s better than that.” I had been so lighthearted that spring and imagined that I had finally met “my Destiny.” The experience of losing my friend was as jarring and as shocking as standing at the end of the wedding aisle and having a shot fired right down the middle. To receive yet another sweet note, but to say that the plans are off for now, and to put life on hold. To not even be sure I wanted to live any more, to wish I, too, could die, and to at the same time feel absolutely terrified because of what had happened to my friend. A new novel by Thulani Davis describing a similar experience of losing a friend was a great comfort to me, as was the minister’s sermon “Watchman, What of the Night?” at church that summer.

Life for me was never the same again, and never will be again. That experience made it utterly impossible for me to ever trust life again. I totally lost my ability to trust most people, especially older black women I didn't know like the woman she had trusted and lived with, who was said to have run next door to call a relative (not even the police!) and left my friend in the house at the mercy of her mentally ill grandson. Every conference that I attended and every talk that I gave was a miracle during that time. Being alone in strange cities and even something as simple as stepping out into the hallway at a hotel alone made me uncomfortable. I never had to. My mother and college roommate from freshman year met me at conferences in Mississippi and Atlanta, respectively, and slept in the bed with me. The guy I was seeing took off his job to meet me in several cities for others that year. When I went down, stood and spoke with charisma, and in my typical style without notes and introduced a panel on civil rights photography at a major conference in 2004, only my mom and a top scholar/ mentor in the audience I’d told about what happened to my friend truly knew and understood what it took to do that in front of a huge audience and the intense pain I was still feeling as I spoke. Another close girl friend also told me about the loss of one of her former professors at the hands of a student she had mentored, who was infatuated with her, became enraged when he saw her at a Valentine’s party on campus with another man, stalked her home and decapitated her. Then had gone out and killed himself. That tragic story was also sobering and terrifying and underscored the lack of safety, even in university settings. My friend said that one does not know who students are all the time either, or what some could be capable of, and made me promise her that I would not ever have them over again to parties at my home, which she knew I sometimes hosted at the end of my graduate seminar. And I didn’t, not for another five years.

I have kept my filters tight and my circles very small since then, and am okay with that. Even now, I tend not to have social interactions with people I don’t know. It has been an uphill struggle to feel safe with black women who were not already friends, or who are not family, and for months, it took a long time for me to get beyond the image of a woman running out to save herself as my friend was brutally murdered by a grandson she brought there, and who had not even called the police, but called a relative. The police drove up, and the paper said that he was just standing out in the front yard holding a bloody knife. From the day I learned that, I have kept my distance, been entirely my own woman, and accepted that not every woman in this world can be my sister or my friend. I have definitely come a long way over these years, in terms of the healing process, in the sense of being able to be at least a bit more open now in ways that the thirty-three-year-old me was absolutely incapable of being after this tragedy happened, and that would have been absolutely out of the question for me. I insisted on having Thanksgiving dinner alone in 2004.

Only faith and prayers helped me through this very difficult period. God got me through it and also broke my bonds with certain people. You really learn who your friends are. I mean, if a person can hear that someone suffered a tragedy like this, and then not give them as much as a phone call to see how they are doing, then they are not much of a friend; there’s really not much to say for them anyway. “Great Is They Faithfulness” was the song He wrote on my heart. Indeed. “All I have needed thy hand hath provided.”

For several months, I got a few cards in the mail from people I didn’t know, and I appreciated how they reached out. I presumed they came from some of the members of my friend's church. One day when I went to my office, I found a message on the answering machine from one of our mutual old friends, and we talked. I paid no bills between April and June, but finally, realized that I’d have to pull it together or end up with my utilities turned off. It helped, too, and I was pulled back to reality, when a friend and reporter had left a message on my phone one day I got back from campus telling me that “It is time for us to talk about this.” She wanted to do a news feature story on my friend, and so I put her in touch with a member of my friend’s family and our spiritual mentor. (I shared some of my reflections on her in the foreword to the remarkable book by our mutual spiritual mentor entitled Come Inside: Discovering Your Purpose, which is available on Amazon.com). In general, her story needs to be told and celebrated by the people who knew her and have a sense of what a special and remarkable person she was. Cheerleader. Class valedictorian. College graduate. Military career. Her beautiful laugh. Her laughter. Her beauty. Her profound and devoted Christian faith. She wrote a wonderful essay for an anthology that a friend and I were co-editing in the early 1990s. I still have a copy of it, and will be sure to post it at some point, which will be especially inspiring, I think, to all the people who knew her. I also posted that great picture on Facebook one day, because I know she would have wanted her old friends to see it.

It hurt so deeply that the wonderful and well-meaning news story about my friend by this outstanding reporter, that included interviews with some of her family and her mentor, which sounded lovely and thorough, and like a wonderful and appropriate tribute to a remarkable young black woman, was not picked up and included in the paper. It hurt that no follow-up to the brief article that didn't mention her name ever appeared in the paper acknowledging who she was and the loss of a truly beautiful person. I am not sure that I was the very last person she talked to as she made her Easter calls, though I have always imagined I was. It seems like whoever investigated what happened to her was unconcerned. There was very little information about what happened to her, and I knew very little myself. And to this day, I have also never heard what happened to the person who did it, or if he even ever went to trial and jail or was institutionalized. The media has never mentioned anything about it, and after they first reported the incident, again, never followed up with a mention of who she was or where she came from. That the fine article written about her was not published felt like a slap in the face, and reminded me, yet again, how devalued black women’s lives and experiences can be by the media. This phenomenon accords with what Rebecca Wanzo describes in her book entitled The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling. I heard of a similar failure in Northern California to report on a crime against a young black woman in the media in more recent years, and it took me right back to the case with my friend. It may be that because they felt they had their man, nothing else needed to be said about it, or my friend.

I can’t even describe the numbing feeling of standing in front of a classroom for the first time in the aftermath and looking out at a lecture hall of students, hoping and praying words and reality would find me again; my graduate TA let the video we were playing run for longer than planned, sensing the difficulty of the moment for me. Otherwise, on campus, I was on my own in all of it. A friend in Southern studies and his wife met me in Montgomery to attend my cousin’s debutante's cotillion that next Saturday, I flew cross-country back to California that Monday just to teach my Tuesday graduate class, and cross-country back to Montgomery that Wednesday to attend my friend’s service that Thursday. I didn’t ask my department for any special favors and teaching days away, and no one can ever say that it did anything to make things easier or better for me during that time, because that just didn’t happen. The bureaucracy on my job went on. I was very prepared for tenure review by then, and everything was on track, but even so, no one seemed to think or care whether I was in any shape and frame of mind to go up for tenure or to submit my dossier on time after experiencing this horrible tragedy. If a woman is having a baby, it’s one thing, but if she’s suffered through the murder of a friend, then there’s no university policy as obvious or accessible that accounts for such personal issues. As a young and single woman, I felt entirely illegible within the campus policies, definitions, procedures and benefits related to family and work/life issues.

All of this, I think, was also just a byproduct of the kind of alienation that can happen in a state bureaucracy. And I feel that it is, too, because I experienced a version of this again in the fall of 2005 when one of my students, a graduate student enrolled in my undergraduate African American literature lecture, was reported in the news as missing and then discovered to have died tragically a few days later. My TA and I were on our own in dealing with the shock and pain of our class of 60 students and our own hurt and as we ordered flowers and circulated cards signed by the students to send to the young woman's family. The only institutional acknowledgement I got of it was an email from the registrar that dropped the student from the roll. I broke down in my office and cried when I received it. I couldn’t believe that a beautiful young black woman was gone, and that the only engagement with her teachers about it was to drop her from my class roll, as if there needed to be any more concrete reminders that she was gone. I knew she wasn't there anymore and didn’t need that revised roster. Receiving that email was utterly devastating to me. In that moment, there seemed to be no support available. What happened in that situation is also one of the reasons that I vowed not to ever work on a campus again that has no chapel present, for when matters of faith are relevant, secular institutional approaches can be insufficient to address such issues and are not always adequate to provide the layers of support necessary to help people through difficult moments. No teaching resources center even seemed prepared to deal with the kinds of tough pedagogical issues that came with that tragic situation, or the kinds of issues it brought up for me that had nothing to do with teaching in the typical sense.

When I was tenured unanimously at Associate Professor, Step II in my department in October of 2004 and also voted and proposed as a candidate for an additional accelerated promotion, it felt great. But by then, a part of me definitely wanted to leave California. I was truly ready to leave for that and a range of other reasons. My constant prayer was to move on. Yet, life doesn’t work like that. One day at a time, one step at a time, God brought me through it, helped me to find ways to push through it, and made me stronger. When I finally did leave, I felt sad to leave my place, which I loved, and that was where my friend remembered me living. She’d come in, and play this game of picking out any new painting, and I knew what all of her favorite things there were.

I’ve shared all of this to say that when I heard Rachel Jeantal’s testimony, I so identified with her. I was able to understand at least to some extent what she experienced with Trayvon from the trauma I also experienced when losing my friend, and from our telephone exchange. Every day that Rachel has ever been able to smile again and face the world is a miracle. I remember my friend’s story and how her loss devastated so many people, and feel for Rachel and Trayvon. I will never forget that final call. Until a person has walked a mile in another person’s shoes or been where they have been, it is impossible to know them, or to even judge them, and judging Rachel or anybody is never right anyway. Tupac had it so right. “Only God can judge me.” And only God truly knows the depth of the pain this young woman has been through. Only God.

The "Portraits" Project

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Emma Jenkins Richardson, My Grandmother, while living in Pensacola, Florida during WW II

Joe Richardson, My Grandfather, while living in Pensacola, FL, During WW II

My grandmother, Emma Jenkins Richardson

JoAnn/Joanne Richardson, My Mother at uncle and aunt's house in Montgomery, Alabama

My Mother as a baby with my grandmother at uncle and aunt's house.

My mother as a baby with my grandfather at uncle and aunt's house.

My mother as a baby

My mother

My mother JoAnn/Joanne and uncle, Joseph Richardson, as children in 1955

My mother dressed for a program and parade in Montgomery in the 1950s

My mother and uncle at Christmas in Montgomery in the 1950s

My mother and uncle at Christmas in the 1950s

My mother at age 10

My uncle, Joseph Richardson, as May Day King at Booker T. Washington Elementary in Montgomery, with the Queen, a girl named Mary, and baby sister Pam

My mother as First Attendant to May Day Queen at her school

My aunt, Pamela Richardson, as a toddler with her doll and stuffed animal at Christmas

My aunt Pam with her doll at Christmas

My grandmother, Emma Jenkins Richardson, with my mother and aunt Pam

My aunt Pam's graduation from kindergarten

My aunt, Pamela Richardson, as May Day Queen at Booker T. Washington Elementary

Clipping from the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper featuring my aunt as May Day Queen at BTW

My Mother's high school graduation picture (BTW)

My uncle's high school graduation picture (BTW)

My aunt's high school graduation picture (Jeff Davis)

My high school graduation picture (St. Jude Educational Institute)

Images of my grandparents in Pensacola, Florida during WWII in the 1940s, as well as various vintage family photos taken in Montgomery, Alabama beginning in the 1950s that inspired my Portraits Project in Art quilting. The images of my mother and aunt from the 1950s and 1960s with the black dolls that my grandmother would buy them growing up also stand out to me in our family photo collection; also see the post on this blog on "Black Debutantes" for more family photos that have helped to inspire this exhibition.

The Portraits Project

My second solo art quilt exhibition entitled “Portraits II: From Montgomery to Paris” has been very exciting to develop as a follow-up to my first, “Portraits from Montgomery to Paris,” which debuted at Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama July-September 2008 and was also featured at the Carol Tatkon Center Art Gallery at Cornell University in 2011. Four pieces from this show were also featured at the Mairie du 5e in Paris, and two at the U.S. Ambassador’s Residence in the city when I was invited to the city as a “Cultural Envoy” by the U.S. Embassy in France for the Paris opening of its national quilt exhibition, “Un Patchwork de Cultures,” under the sponsorship of a grant from the U.S. Department of State in its Speaker Series. Selected works from this show have also been featured in several other places, including a 2009 exhibition on “Black Debutantes” at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.

The body of quilts from “Portraits” is the subject of the short film by Anne Crémieux and Géraldine Chouard entitled “A Portrait of the Artist”(2008), which was shot on location in Paris, France and highlighted an interview with the scholar Patricia A. Turner. Pat Turner also discusses the “Portraits” project in her book Crafted Lives: Stories and Studies of African American Quilters. Quilts from “Portrait II” are also featured in Lauren Cross’s film The Skin Quilt Project (2010).

Already, works from “Portraits II” have been in circulation. In January 2009, the very first quilt produced on the road to this new show, which features President Obama, was first presented in Paris, France prior to the inauguration in the U.S. and went on to appear in Roland Freeman’s “Quilts for Obama” at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. for most of that year. It is also featured on the commemorative poster for this monumental quilt exhibition, which went into two encores, including a final encore on request of the Congressional Black Caucus and the mayor of Washington, D.C. My quilt featuring Michelle Obama was added to the final encore of “Quilts for Obama that began in September 2009. The Obama quilts that led off “Portraits II,” as well as those featuring Frederick Douglass and Toni Morrison, were also featured in the exhibition at Cornell University at the Carol Tatkon Center Art Gallery. The production team for “Portraits II” is hard at work and very excited about the new show opening in January, 2015 and aims for it to be featured in several venues.

“Portraits” included four series in all, including “Family,” “Paris,” “Political” and “Hollywood.” Smaller series within the “Family Series” include series entitled
“Wedding,” “Baby,” “Self-Portrait,” “Education,” and “Debutante.” Portraits II continues to develop all of the foundational series and incorporates several more, including “Black History,” “African American Literature,” “Alabama Women,” and new versions of “Daughters of Africa” and “Delta,” which I began in the early 1990s. The “Portraits” project recalls May Day celebrations in Montgomery, Alabama dating back to the 1950s, as well as Easter parades, school programs, and birthday celebrations. In the process, it captures a side of black life, particularly in the U.S. South, less frequently discussed. As the curator Georgette Norman describes “Portraits” in the 2008 catalog for the show at Rosa Parks Museum, it “draws on aspects of Montgomery and Civil Rights history, but focuses on family showing the dignity and beauty that always existed . . . Portraits . . . captures in new form family photos and memories, and also treats political and cultural figures from Martin Luther King to Scarlett O’Hara.“

The words “new form” well speak to the approach that I take to quilting, as do my comments at the opening of the film “A Portrait of the Artist,” which mention my goal of “pushing quilting as far as I can, so that even the question, ‘what is a quilt,’ is ultimately raised.” All of my quilts usually include at least one feature that is challenging to pull off; I refer to them as “special effects.” I once made a casual and offhand list of the eclectic features that constitute my mixed-media quilting style above and beyond the foundational fabrics. They include hats, jewelry, shoes, fingernails, ribbons, eyelashes, synthetic hair, orthodontic braces, buttons, safety pins, boas, fruit, beading, flowers, glasses, mirrors, and ties, among others. The quilts for the new show expand the body of special effects that I incorporate and take my architectural “three-dimensional” quilting style and the notion of the “built quilt” in some new and quite exciting directions. I draw all of the images on my quilts by hand and paint them with fabric or acrylic paints; I do all of the quilting by hand.

Many people describe them as “quilts unlike any I have ever seen before.” Below is a comprehensive listing of the works that so far make up my multi-year “Portraits” project in art quilting, which I began in 1999 and by the time that it culminates in 2015, will have been developing for 15 years.

Portraits II: From Montgomery to Paris (2015)

from Family Series #2, Including Baby and Children, Education, Debutante and Self-Portrait Series, and 5 installations (the show features 8 installation-style quilts in all)

1. “Debutante Daddy: Joe Richardson Presenting Daughter Pamela Richardson As a Debutante in National Sorority of Phi Delta Kappa, Inc., Beta Beta Chapter Cotillion, Garrett Coliseum, Montgomery Alabama, Spring 1976” (Joe Richardson, b. July 11, 1915 and Commemorating 100 Years in 2015) (Debutante Series).
Installation-style panel 1 of 3 (Composition 2011- )

2. “Debutante Pamela Richardson Presented by Father, Joe Richardson, at National Sorority of Phi Delta Kappa, Inc., Beta Beta Chapter Cotillion, Garrett Coliseum, Montgomery Alabama, Spring 1976; Escorted by Ricky Ross” (Debutante Series) Installation-style panel 2 of 3 (Composition 2011- )

3. “Debutante Mama: Emma Richardson, Mother of Pamela Richardson in National Sorority of Phi Delta Kappa, Inc. Beta Beta Chapter Cotillion, Garret Coliseum, Montgomery Alabama, Spring 1976” (Debutante Series). Installation-style panel 3 of 3 (Composition 2011- )

4. “JoAnn and ‘Junior Man’ II: Cowboys at Christmas.” Installation-style quilt
Special Thanks to T-Shirt Express for Screenprinting Background Photographs (Composition 2009- )

5. “Pam as Booker T Washington May Day Queen” (Composition 2009- )

6. “Joseph and Mary as Booker T Washington May Day King and Queen”(Composition 2009 - )

7. “Riché Deianne Richardson: Easter Sunday at Maggie Street Baptist Church in Junior Vogue Dress #1 of 3 in All” (Composition2011-)

8. “Riché Deianne Richardson as Jr. Gayfer Girl in 1983 at Age 11 and Dressed for the Group Photo, the First Event after Graduation from Poise-Charm Classes at Gayfers Department Store (formerly Montgomery Fair) in Montgomery Mall"(Family Series, Education Series, Self-Portrait Series) (Composition 2012-13) Special Thanks to T-Shirt Express for the T-Shirt Design and Production

9. “’Head and Shoulders Knees and Toes!’: Keri Diamond Smith and Megan Chereé Smith, School Days at St. John-Resurrection"(Family Series, Education Series) Installation-style quilt (Composition 2005-12)

10. “Keri and Megan: Pink Dresses and Homemade Birthday Cake” (Composition 2011- )
Bea: Remembering 30 Years in Elba, Alabama as a School Teacher (Family Series, Education Series)

11. “Riché Deianne Richardson: On Profile in the State of Alabama” (Self-Portrait) (2011- )

Political Series

12. “Obama Time: Always (Congratulations, Mr. President!)” (Composition 2008-09)

13. “The Magnificent Michelle Obama, Our First Lady: ‘Strength and Honor are Her Clothing’(Proverbs 31: 25)”(Political Series) (Composition 2009)

14. “Mary McLeod Bethune: One of America’s Greatest Sweethearts and the World’s Best Leaders”(Composition 2012-)

15 "Clarence Thomas’s High Tech Lynching?: Inferior Court Justice to Be"(Political Series) (Composition 2002-12)

16. "Condoleezza Rice: From Birmingham to the White House" (Alabama Women Series, Political Series) (Composition 2011- 2012)

Civil Rights Movement Series

17. “Rosa Parks, Whose ‘No’ in 1955 Launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Was Heard Around the World”(Commemorating 100 Years, 1913-2013) (Civil Rights Movement Series, Black History Series, Alabama Women Series). Dedicated to Georgette Norman (Composition 2006-12)

18. “Johnnie Rebecca Carr, Leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association” (Also Black History Series and Alabama Women Series). Dedicated to Annie Bell and Benjamin Beasley and Alma Lee Jordan (Composition 2012- )

19. “E.D. Nixon: Father of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Civil Rights Movement” (Black History Series) In Memory of E.D. Nixon, Jr., a.k.a. “Nick LaTour” (Composition 2012- )

20. “Angela Davis Free and Standing Against a New Form of American Slavery: The Prison Industrial Complex” (Black History Series and Alabama Women Series) (Composition 2011- )

Paris Series

21. “James Baldwin” (African American Literature Series) (Composition 2012- )

22. “Richard Wright” (African American Literature Series) (Composition 2012- )

23. “Audrey Tautou as Amélie”(Composition 2011)

Hollywood Series

24. “Charleston's Finest: Clark Gable as Rhett Butler" (Composition 2006-12)

25. “’Bope’: Bo and Hope: All Days Always” (Celebrating the History, Beauty and Work of Daytime Television)

26. “Dorothy Dandridge Playing Carmen Jones” Installation-style quilt
(Composition 2012- )

27. “To Sidney Poitier with Love” (Composition 2012-)

28. “The Marvelous Marilyn Monroe” Installation-style quilt (Composition 2011 - )

Black History Series

29. “Daughter of Africa, Mother of African American Literature, Another American Revolution” (Black History Series, African American Literature Series, & New Daughters of Africa Series). Dedicated to Honorée Jeffers (Composition 2010-12)

30. “The Great Abolitionist Frederick Douglass: ‘I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday’; Birthday Unknown but Celebrated February 14” (Black History Series) Dedicated to Class of 2009, Suger High School, Saint-Denis in Paris, France Installation-style quilt (Composition 2010-11)

31. “Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison”(African American Literature Series) (Composition 2010)
“The Vision of W.E.B. Du Bois”(Composition 2012- )

32. “The Talent of Michael Jackson”(Composition 2011-)

Delta Women Series

Delta Family Quilt: Pamela Garrett
Delta Family Quilt: Riché Richardson
Delta Family Quilt: Megan Smith
Delta Family Quilt: Keri Smith
“Adrienne Lance Lucas and Son: Celebrating Delta Leadership, Legacies and Love”

May opt to add three additional works to the show

Portraits from Montgomery to Paris(2008)

from Family Series #1, Including Wedding, Graduation/Education, and Debutante Series, Three Installations, and Artist Self Portraits

1. "Sunday Afternoon on Palafox Street in Pensacola, Florida during WWII": Emma Lue
Jenkins Richardson (Composition 1999-00)

2. Sunday Afternoon on Palafox Street in Pensacola, Florida during WWII: Joe Richardson (Composition 2000-01)

3. "JoAnn and 'Junior Man': Easter Sunday, Montgomery, Alabama, 1954"(Installation)(Composition 2001-04)

4. "Pam's Graduation from Kindergarten at Mrs. Drake's"(Installation) (Composition 2005-08)

5. " JoAnn Richardson: Graduation Picture at Booker Washington High School"(Composition 2005-06)

6. "Joseph Richardson: Graduation Picture at Booker Washington High School"(Composition 2006-07)

7. "Pamela Richardson: Graduation Picture at Jefferson Davis High School"(Composition 2005-08)

8. "The Honeymooners: Celebrating 47 Years: Emma Richardson"(Composition 2005-06)

9. "The Honeymooners: Celebrating 47 Years: Joe Richardson" (Composition 2005-08)

10. Riché Deianne Richardson: Graduation Picture at St. Jude Educational Institute of 'The City of St. Jude' (The Last Camping Place for Selma-to-Montgomery Marchers in 1965) Self-Portrait (Composition period. Special Thanks to Dr. Kelly Gianetti for Sterilized Orthodontic Appliances (Composition 2005-06)

11. Riché Deianne Richardson, Age 17: Debutante Cotillion Program Portrait, 1989" Self-Portrait (Composition 2006-08)

12. "Keri Diamond Smith, Age 17: Debutante Cotillion Program Portrait, 2004"(Composition 2006-08)

13. "Megan Chereé Smith, Age 17: Debutante Cotillion Program Portrait, 2006"(Composition 2006-08)

from Paris Series #1

14. "Playing Venus Hot to Trot?: Josephine Baker"(Commemorating 100 years, 1906-2006)(Composition 2001-05)

15. "Remembering a Dutiful Daughter: Simone de Beauvoir" (Commemorating 100 years, 1908-2008)(Composition 2004-07)

from Political Series #1

16. "The Ties that Bind: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy"(Composition 2002-04)

17. "A Tie, Too?": Malcolm X" (Composition 2002-04)

from Hollywood Series # 1

18. "Playing 'Mammy': Not Hattie McDaniel!"(Composition 2006-08)

19. "Sweet Scarlett?: Vivien Leigh Playing Southern Belle"(Composition 2006-08)

Jr. Gayfer Girl Quilt

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"Riché Deianne Richardson as Jr. Gayfer Girl in 1983 at Age 11 and Dressed for the Group Photo, the First Event after Graduation from Poise-Charm Classes at Gayfers Department Store (formerly Montgomery Fair) in Montgomery Mall"(Family Series, Education Series, Self-Portrait Series)

Mixed-media, including paint, jewelry, fabric, synthetic hair, and denim border and backing

Group Photo of Poise-Charm Class at Eastdale Mall in Montgomery, Alabama, in Spring of 1983, 6th from left on back row

Age 11. Posing for photo after graduation fashion show in spring of 1983 from six-week Poise-Charm Course at Montgomery, Mall; am wearing my favorite piece of clothing at the time (other than my Calvins), my white lace ruffled prairie blouse. We had the matching prairie skirt made by a wonderful seamstress named Edwina who had made a few things for me around that time, like my choir uniform for the Tender Golden Voices at Maggie Street Baptist Church. In the poise-charm course, we learned skills such as runway modeling, introductions, poise-pivot turns, how to sit properly, mannequin modeling, and dealing with different accessories on the runway.

Age 14. Photo shoot at Gayfers Department Store for graduates after completing second poise-charm course, "Seventeen's Beautyworks."

Autobiographical reflections

●All New Junior Gayfer Girl Club members, about 25, wore a red lettered T-Shirt with jeans for the 'Class Photo' Taken in Front of Gayfers at Eastdale Mall; the T-Shirt used on this quilt is a replica and recreation made by T-Shirt Express in Ithaca, NY

●In an era when it seemed that if you didn’t have your Calvins, then you weren’t cool, I was wearing Jordache jeans with a gold Jordache belt because of accidentally burning the label off my Calvins when ironing jeans before class one evening in the spring. Was also wearing a pair of white and blue Jordache canvas tennis shoes whose little yarn horse mane I loved.

●Rhea Alfreds was our instructor, and the overall course program, which included "White Gloves and Party Manners" for small girls and "Seventeen's Beautyworks" (influenced by Seventeen Magazine) for older girls, was coordinated by Wanda Marshall.

●I returned to poise-charm classes at Gayfers for the Seventeen's Beautyworks course at age 14.

●Being a Junior Gayfer Girl for two years (from ages 11-13) came with seasonal 10% store discounts (which were nice to get though I actually used the discount just once). Junior Gayfer Girls also had the opportunity to attend the final rehearsal of the annual "Back to School Fashion Show" of the Gayfer Girls downtown at the Davis Theater. The highlight was being asked to stand up together as a club for recognition briefly as the spotlight panned the audience on the actual night of the show.

● I best remember the show where the theme was "Borrowed from the Boys." Fall fashion items such as ties and tams were modeled to the tune of songs such as "I Wear My Sunglasses at Night" and the theme of Pink Panther films. Attending the show was the highlight of my summer other than attending the University for Youth at Alabama State University, where my family enrolled me four straight summers between ages 12 and 15 for courses taught by university professors.

●This poise-charm class at Montgomery Mall was my only education in a racially integrated educational setting before I was 22 and started my work on a Ph.D. at Duke.

●The other African American girls in this course were my friend LaShaun Hooks who had told me about it in the first place and urged me to take the course with her; her sister Alicia (whom I, like her, called "Lisa"); Candi Turner; Peaches Oldes; and LeCheryl Lesueur.

●I once saw one of our classmates in a clothing store at the newly remodeled Montgomery Mall in high school, who had by then grown tall like I had, and still had the most amazing long, honey-blond curly locks of hair. When recognized by name, she said hello, smiled warmly and said, "We must have met at Cynthia's," a modeling school. She seemed so sure of it that I didn't have the heart to correct her and mention that we were actually in the class together at Gayfers years earlier and that I'd never attended Cynthia's.

●My grandfather, who took me to my classes which met weekly on Thursday evenings for an hour, was okay with me taking the course mainly because it stressed etiquette and cultivated social graces.

●Gayfers purchased Montgomery Fair in Montgomery, Alabama in 1970, which is where Rosa Parks was working at the time of her arrest in 1955.

●A few years later when I was 17, my family bought my debutante dress at Gayfers and had it altered by the store's seamstress, an African American woman named Hannah Foster(who had the job Rosa Parks once had when Gayfers was Montgomery Fair). She also tailored a beautiful wardrobe for me in wool gabardine when I was 25 and in graduate school, and made several lovely matching dresses for my cousins Keri and Megan when they were little girls.

●My Grandmother kept her old Montgomery Fair hat box and also used her and my grandfather's credit card that still said "Montgomery Fair" until Dillard's replaced Gayfers in the late 1990s.

Link below to the review I wrote at Amazon.com of Marjabelle Young Stewart and Ann Buchwald’s book What to Do When and Why: At School, At Home, at Parties, in Your Growing World, which I posted on May 25, 2002. Also see Stewart’s White Gloves and Party Manners, the book that inspired the beginning poise-charm course at Gayfers for little girls.

http://www.amazon.com/What-Do-When-Why-Parties/dp/0883311054/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1357628136&sr=8-10&keywords=marjabelle+young+stewart

For Savoir-Faire Everywhere

This book was distributed in the first set of poise-charm classes that I took at Gayfers department store in Montgomery, Alabama at age 11. Through weekly drills, we covered topics such as walking on a runway, making regular poise-pivot turns and Dutch boys, climbing stairs, doing introductions, maintaining good posture, and sitting properly, among others. In the end, we had a fashion show at the mall, and membership in the Jr. Gayfer Girl Club was extended to us, along with seasonal store discounts at 10%. This was the spring of 1983 when "Calvins" still meant almost everything and many girls in my class said that Tom Selleck was their favorite actor[I said mine was Billy Dee Williams, LaShaun said Gary Coleman, and Alicia said Nell Carter]; it was before anyone had ever heard of a concept such as the "supermodel." By this I mean that few if any of us in the class had an idea of who Gia Carangi was or what she represented at the time. As I recall, Stewart's book covers numerous questions: How to set a table? How to make introductions? What to do when you lose your best friend or boyfriend- the kinds of relationships that are at best "iffy" from the start? (And this is where I first learned that word, along with a few others, for overall, Stewart addresses her young audience with the grace of Miss Manners and does not condescend to it by watering down her language). How to handle it when you are the target of gossip? She offers a party lexicon, consisting of varieties such as the "come as you are party." She addresses the importance of sending a "bread and butter" note after visiting someone. There are even, I think, a few recipes. And there's a section for filling in your family tree inside the front cover. We never engaged this book directly in our course, but this was reading that I complemented by poring over illustrated sections on "social graces" in one of the old and very thick dictionaries in our house, which seemed to cover just about everything. I was disappointed that in a later charm course I took at age 14, the official book was one from Seventeen magazine and more focused on makeup instead of the development of social skills along the lines of Stewart's book. I even read and referred to her book many times throughout my early teen years. I finally passed my much-loved copy on to the preteen little sister of my boyfriend when I was 17, for I was tutoring her in math at the time. In retrospect, this is a book that part of me wishes I'd held on to as a keepsake, for only hindsight has allowed me to understand fully the difference that it helped to make in my social, emotional and personal development and maturation. In general, exposure to a text with that kind of orientation at an early age also introduced me to and gave me a deep love and appreciation for the "how to" genre, and to this day, as an adult working as a university professor and moonlighting as an artist, I regularly mix "how to" books into the range of selections that I read. This book may have also put me on the road to cultivating a love for books in the self-help genre, though I don't always have a lot of time to read these kinds of selections. The world has changed a lot since this book's first publication date, and with all the complex issues youth often face in and beyond school settings these days, it may well come across to some as dated and old-fashioned. But I think that there is a timeless quality about it that would make it work for any time.

My "I Voted" Facebook Post from November 6, 2012

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After voting in Ithaca, New York, I posted the photo below on my page with the accompanying text, "Mission Accomplished!"