My Barbie Dreamhouse Art Inspiration and Installation

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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.