PHOTOS: Local Artists Celebrate Black History Month

Two local artists’ work is on display at the i5 Teaching Network until Monday and people are encouraged to drop in before the exhibit is taken down.

Casandra Allen, a Gales Ferry resident and full time school nurse at Gales Ferry School, has about 40 hand made quilts hanging in the gallery. Allen said she gets her African-inspired fabrics at a market in Harlem, New York.

The quilts, which range in size from 8” x 10” to queen size or larger and they are a combination of hand stitched and machine stitched. Allen embellishes the quilts with beading, embroidery, etc and that each quilt takes a couple months to complete.

Allen said that when she begins a quilt, she doesn’t really know how it will look at the end because “it’s a like a puzzle.”

Allen’s quilts have been accepted in six juried shows and they are also for sale at the i5 Teaching Network gallery in the Gales Ferry Community Center.

The gallery is open Friday from noon to 5:00, Saturday from 10am to noon.

New London artist Marie Collins is also on display and she too works with fabric of all sorts only she makes fabric dolls.

“It takes me back to where we came from, she said of making the dolls. “It’s important to teach that to the kids.”

She uses recycled fabric for the dolls and their clothes. Some dolls are made with wire and outfitted with hand stitched clothes. She said it takes a couple hours to a couple days to finish a doll.

Collins said she loves doing all kinds of handi work like crochet, quilting, doll making and that she has been at it for more than 20 years. She gets her inspiration from magazines  and she knows exactly how the project will look upon completion.

“Once I get my mind set, I’m directly on it,” she said.

Her dolls do not have facial features because she wants the new owners to find that for themselves.

“To me that’s more personal,  I let the person create their own face,” she said. “If you look at the long enough you do see a face.”

Collins has all types of dolls and she said kids and adults enjoy them. Although she likes them all, one of her favorite dolls is the topsy turvy doll. The doll fuses a white child and a black child at the hips so that the doll can be flipped upside down to reveal the one and conceal the other. The doll has sparked controversy and speculation among historians and doll collectors since no one knows precisely how or why the doll was created that way.

According to Wikipedia, “Doll collector Wendy Lavitt writes, "It has recently been suggested that these dolls were often made for Black children who desired a forbidden white doll (a baby like the ones their mothers cared for); they would flip the doll to the black side when an overseer passed them at play."

Or, “African American slave women may have given dolls like these to their daughters as a preparation for a possibility of a life devoted to nurturing two babies: one black and one white. Topsy-turvy dolls are designed for children to play with one baby at a time, and this accurately reflects the division of caregiving that African American women encountered, having to care for white children during the day and their own children at night. These handmade dolls are important, creative expressions of those otherwise silent women we know only as "mammy."

Collins has several dolls for sale at the gallery and the public is invited to take a look Friday from noon to 5:00, Saturday from 10am to noon.