addy gets a childhood is a poem, video, pleasure & reclamation project created by poet/musician/composer/artist kim mayo, aka moonheart. ‘addy’ reimagines the life of the (until recently) only black American Girl Doll, Addy Walker, whose white creators saw a black doll & called her an enslaved child, a child who had to escape that, a child who was not afforded what should have been her birthright, had she not been born into this anti-black, imperialist, white supremacist, hetero-patriarchal, capitalist world-a childhood. This project seeks to give to Addy all of the joy, the pleasure, the play, the freedom, the candies, the safety, the rambling afternoons, the delights of childhood that she was not afforded. It is a blessing sent back to mayo’s baby ancestors, & one sent toward the future, where mayo envisions a world in which each black child is allowed to be one.
Curated by Vision Resident Starr Busby