The Ebell presents a Black Doll Workshop led by Adrienne DeVine, resident artist at the William Grant Still Arts Center, as part of a members-only field trip to The 45th Annual Black Doll Show, Sower of Seeds: Creating a New Tomorrow at The William Grant Still Arts Center. This hands-on experience explores the cultural and spiritual legacy of corn husk figures, forms tracing a continuum from Africa through the African American experience in the United States. Historically used as teaching tools, protective charms, and symbols of survival and renewal, these figures hold deep ancestral meaning. Using plant-based and found materials, participants will create a figure inspired by I See You, I Am Here, centering presence, continuity, and remembrance through making.

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Members will also tour The 45th Annual Black Doll Show, Sower of Seeds: Creating a New Tomorrow, which draws inspiration from Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, where change is both truth and teacher. Through handmade and collected Black dolls, this year’s exhibition reflects on transformation amid uncertainty — raids, displacement, fire, flood, and renewal. What new worlds can emerge when care, imagination, and resilience take root? Each doll becomes a vessel of hope, a reminder that all we touch, that we change — and in changing, we create tomorrow.
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Adrienne DeVine is a Pasadena-based mixed media artist whose work spans installations, collage, wire sculpture, and handmade books. Her practice explores history, cultural heritage, indigenous worldviews, and materiality, centering Black narratives and artistic expression. DeVine has exhibited at the California African American Museum and throughout greater Los Angeles, and has contributed to the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s African American Craft Initiative.
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Members should meet at the William Grant Still Arts Center at 11:00 AM.
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This event is part of The Ebell's slate of Black History Month programming.

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