2026 Call for Dolls for William Grant Still's Black Doll Show

CALL FOR DOLLS AND ART

The William Grant Still Arts Center is now accepting submissions for the 46th Annual Black Doll Show – Title TBA. This year’s exhibition, curated by Vera Warren-Williams, is working around the theme of migration inspired by the first and second waves of The Great Migration of Black people from the South to other parts of the United States. This show will concentrate solely on Black people who moved from Louisiana to Los Angeles.

Theme
The exhibition invites artists and dollmakers to explore the cultural, environmental, and ancestral connections between Louisiana and Los Angeles. This year’s Black Doll Show will be presented across two locations, William Grant Still Arts Center in Los Angeles and Community Book Center on Bayou Road in New Orleans, creating a dialogue between two communities connected by migration, memory, resilience, and creative expression.

Water and fire provide the central elements of the exhibition. Louisiana has long experienced the devastating effects of floods, hurricanes, and rising waters, while Los Angeles has faced increasingly destructive wildfires. Both landscapes have been shaped by environmental forces that can displace communities, destroy homes, and transform the places people call home. Yet water and fire can also represent renewal, movement, purification, transformation, and survival.

The exhibition also looks to the Second Great Migration, when hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners left Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, and other Southern states in search of greater opportunity, safety, and possibility. Many Louisiana Black families made their way to Los Angeles, establishing deep roots in neighborhoods including West Adams and Jefferson Park. Along Jefferson Boulevard, between Western Avenue and 10th Avenue, a vibrant community became known as the “Creole Corridor” or “Little New Orleans.” Families carried traditions, foodways, music, language, style, spirituality, and social practices with them, creating enduring cultural connections between Louisiana and Southern California.

Through dolls and art, artists are invited to explore what traveled with these families and what transformed along the way. The exhibition can consider the movement of culture through generations, from Black Masking Indian traditions and Mardi Gras celebrations to zydeco, the jig, second-line traditions, Southern foodways, and the evolution of Black dance and street culture in Los Angeles, including the Crip Walk. These traditions can be understood not as isolated practices, but as part of a larger story of Black people carrying, adapting, exchanging, and reinventing culture across regions.

Dolls can become vessels for these stories: ancestors, travelers, dancers, musicians, children, elders, protectors, healers, dreamers, and cultural keepers. They can represent the people who left Louisiana, those who remained, those who built new communities in Los Angeles, and the generations who continue to move between these cultural worlds.

Artists may draw from family histories, archival photographs, neighborhood histories, music, dance, fashion, food, language, environmental memory, and contemporary Black life. Work may directly reference Louisiana and Los Angeles or explore broader questions of migration, displacement, belonging, cultural inheritance, and transformation.

Central Focus:

Water moves. Fire transforms. People migrate. Culture survives by moving, adapting, and being carried forward.

This exhibition asks artists to consider the doll as a vessel of memory and movement, a figure capable of holding ancestral knowledge, environmental memory, cultural tradition, and visions of the future.

From the waters of Louisiana to the fires of Los Angeles, from Bayou Road to Adams Boulevard, what has been carried across generations, what has been transformed, and what will be carried forward?

Guiding Questions:

How can dolls tell stories of the Great Migration and the movement of Black families from Louisiana and the South to Los Angeles?
How might Black Masking Indian traditions, Mardi Gras, zydeco, New Orleans Baby Dolls Ladies, the jig, second-line traditions, Southern foodways, or Los Angeles street-dance traditions such as the Crip Walk be represented through dolls?
What connections exist between Louisiana and Los Angeles that can be revealed through clothing, music, dance, food, language, family, and community?
What happens to culture when people are displaced by floods, fires, economic conditions, or the search for a better life?
How can dolls honor the elders, artists, musicians, dancers, organizers, families, and cultural bearers who created connections between Louisiana and Los Angeles?
What cultural practices have been passed from one generation to another, and what new forms have emerged from that inheritance?
Criteria

We are seeking:

Handmade dolls inspired by either (or both) New Orleans and Los Angeles culture
Character dolls that reflect the New Orleans Baby Doll Ladies, Black Masking Indians, C-walking dolls, prominent figures from either place during from 1910 to the present. 
Mixed-media works that integrate dollmaking with other art forms
Assemblages and sculptural works evoking fire and water or migration
Doll-based scenes that depict migration (driving/smuggling) Think about things they may have brought with them. Consider what it took to get through more dangerous states on their way to Los Angeles from Louisiana. Scenes cooking (gumbo and the like), dancing, and living. 
Africanisms the two places share. 
Types of artwork wanted for exhibition:

Dolls
Other art media, painting, sculpture, performance, video that use or refer to dolls
Handmade, sculpted, cloth, mixed-media, wooden, assemblage, clay, paper, yarn
Dolls of children, elders, families
Altered or artist books connected to the theme
Amulets
Dioramas, story quilts, paintings, photography, and short films centered on dolls

Submission Guidelines – How to Submit – 2026 Doll Show

Email a JPEG photo of your doll(s) or related artwork to wgsarts@lacity.org by Friday, October 23, 2026. Include a short description of your work, a brief artist statement, and a bio.
Submission of photos does not guarantee acceptance into the show.
Artists selected for the exhibition will be notified between November 2 – November 6, 2026.
If chosen, delivery of materials will take place November 16 – 20, 2026 by appointment. (If mailing art work, please consider shipping time and send earlier)
If shipping to New Orleans, William Grant Still Arts Center and City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs are not responsible for the care and keeping and safe return of your artwork. Please contact Community Book Center at 2523 Bayou Raad New Orleans, LA 70119 | (504) 948-7323 
All artists will be asked for a bio
If you have technical challenges, please reach out for assistance by emailing wgsarts@lacity.org or calling 323-734-1165
The exhibition will run from mid-December 2026 to mid-February 2027.

Curator – Vera Warren-Williams – Collector, Historian and Owner of Community Book Center, New Orleans, Louisiana

Vera Warren-Williams
Vera Warren-Williams is a cultural arts advocate, educator, and founder of Community Book Center (CBC). “More than a bookstore,” CBC is located on historic Bayou Road, the oldest street in New Orleans and currently the highest concentration of Black owned businesses. Her lifelong commitment to preserving African culture began in childhood through her early appreciation of dolls, quilting, crafts, and the visual arts.

She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Social Work and a Master’s degree in Museum Studies from Southern University at New Orleans (SUNO). As a graduate student, she developed the Youth Arts Mentoring Program (YAMP), which connects young people with cultural arts education and encourages them to become stewards and guardians of their history and traditions.

While working as a substitute teacher, Vera founded CBC as a home-based community service. More than four decades later, it has grown into a vital literary and cultural institution, providing books, educational resources, and programming that highlight African American history, creativity, and contributions to world civilization.

Her cultural leadership includes producing Congo Square, the African marketplace at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and creating the Book Emporium at the Essence Festival. Through education, cultural entrepreneurship, and community engagement, Vera continues to advance the preservation and accessibility of African American art, history, and cultural expression.

About the Black Doll Show

The Black Doll Show at the William Grant Still Arts Center was started in the 1980s by the Friends of William Grant Still Arts Center, with contemporary artist/curator Cecil and Miriam Fergerson  (1931-2013) as its first curators. It was inspired by a doll test conducted by Mamie and Kenneth Clark in the 1940s. The tests concluded that due to social stigmas, many African-American children preferred white dolls over black dolls. This test went on to become evidence in civil rights lawsuits. The Clarks became expert witnesses in Brown vs. Board of Education, helping to create the landmark decision to desegregate schools. This doll test was conducted again in 2006 by 17 year old filmmaker Kiri Davis, sadly with the same results. The Black Doll Show is an annual winter tradition at WGSAC as positive self image remains just as necessary today for Africans and all people of color within the continent and in diaspora.