MAKING HISTORY: THE ART AND CRAFT OF RUBY BAILEY'S COTTON SCULPTURES

This thesis focuses on a selection of Cotton Sculptures made by Harlem-based artist and fashion designer, Ruby Hyacinth Bailey (1905-2003). In total, Bailey created about forty of the sculptures—most of which depict women of color wearing original garments that she hand sewed. As Bailey was a fashion designer, her "manikins" could easily be considered mere display stands that showcased her garments in miniature, but, as her name for them suggests, Bailey considered them to be works of art in and of themselves. Focusing on seven sculptures that she made between the 1960s and 1970s, this project broaches the objects as sculpture and considers the ways in which Bailey employed fashion and cotton to incorporate Black creative practices into popular history.

Chapter one analyzes the specific garments and eras that Bailey chose to highlight. The sculptures that I address feature garments such as ballgowns, suits, harem pants, and dashikis, and they span the so-called "gay nineties" through the 1960s, when Bailey made them. Although they highlight notable fashion trends, such as Orientalism and the "New Woman," they also reference times of immense difficulty for the Black community—such as the Jim Crow era and the highpoint of lynching—as well as moments of great creativity and triumph, such as the Harlem Renaissance and the Black is Beautiful Movement. Through fashion, Bailey thus told an inclusive history of the United States. She addressed the good, the bad, and the ugly and thereby visualized the ways in which the struggles of the Black community were not impediments to creative practice, but engines of it.

Chapter two examines Bailey's engagement with the medium of sculpture and her evident interest in bringing cotton into high art. In this chapter I address the materials and techniques that Bailey used to make the sculptures and argue that they celebrate the innovative uses of cotton during enslavement. In the 1960s and 1970s, Minimalism defined avant-garde American sculpture, but popular culture witnessed renewed interest in the history of slavery and cotton's role within it. By reintroducing figuration into sculpture and crafting each and every aspect of her sculptures by hand, Bailey's Cotton Sculptures themselves exhibited and commemorated the same resilience and creativity of spirit as did the garments that they wore. Created in the same period as monumental exhibitions of Black American art, I argue that Bailey's objects offered an expansive history of "sculpture," which included and honored the specific contributions of Black Americans.