The Brooklyn Rail

The gallery’s deep plum walls and gleaming gold accents extend Douriean Fletcher’s worldbuilding beyond jewelry into environment, staging the exhibition with the grandeur of a film set. The Walters Art Museum show includes fourteen historic objects from cultures the world over and puts works from different time periods in conversation with Fletcher’s practice. These pairings position Fletcher less as an individual maker and more as a steward of inherited forms tracing craft traditions across centuries. Each of her works embodies collective consciousness through jewelry-making. In Fletcher’s hands, Black adornment is protection, pleasure, and a vessel for inherited survival.

A story unfolds in three sections: Fletcher’s formative years, film and television projects, and her contemporary practice. The first works the viewer encounters are ancient Egyptian rings created with a wire-wrapping technique. The temporal distance between these rings, which she calls her “personal talismans," and Fletcher’s use of wire wrapping collapses lineage into contemporary practice. The gallery space then opens into an array of didactic objects that recall a history museum. A worn family bible (an important record-keeping modality and literacy symbol among Black Americans), her mother’s tambourine, a rag doll made by a family friend with “Douriean” embroidered onto it, and Fletcher’s first jewelry object in the exhibition and her life—a heart-shaped, sterling silver pendant necklace with “love” in script engraved in the middle, given to her by her grandmother.

The connection between the ancestral and contemporary stands out in a pairing of a hickory doll (1876), made by a formerly enslaved man, Obadiah Beverly, and the Test Neckpiece for “Enslaved People's First Christmas Scene” in Roots (2016) by Fletcher. In Beverly’s work, the doll is imbued with sentience through two pieces of fabric tied around a hickory nut to make the head and the pointed end of the seed to create a nose. One piece of fabric, with a subtle faded pattern, hangs down from the seed, making a dress, and the other strip of fabric is tied around the neck as the collar, transforming sparse materials into companionship and preserving the possibility of childhood wonder under violent conditions. Fletcher adapts these visual references in her neckpiece for Roots, created for a celebratory scene where joy persists despite constraint. Her neckpiece comprises leaves, branches, wire, and twine that recall vegetation with hickory seeds hidden within. The wire protrudes rather than disappears into the work, while the seeds lodge survival within the adornment itself.

Throughout the show, Fletcher traces how she is inspired by Alexander Calder (b. 1898; d. 1976) and Art Smith (b. 1917; d. 1982), though her affinities with each differ. From Calder, she borrows drawing with wire in space, manifesting in her wall sconces. She also employs a similar use of geometric repetition that appears in her Alexander Calder-Inspired Neckpiece (2018), a gold-plated copper work that layers trapezoidal shapes that radiate outward. Across both Smith’s and Fletcher’s practices, they have visual languages that blend dense silver plating to loose, fine line abstract swirls.

Nearby, a Dogon Kneeling Maternity Figure (n.d.) showcases a mother and child. It is beside a mannequin dressed as Queen Ramonda from Marvel Studio’s Black Panther franchise (2022). In this version, Ruth E. Carter’s costuming for Angela Bassett as the film version of the queen—a purple pleated ombre gown—is paired with Fletcher’s brass breastplate, where semi-precious stones sit within pronged settings and bezeled collars. Attached to the large, central gem is a replication of a wooden mask, from the Eastern Pende people of the Democratic Republic of Congo, that Fletcher refers to as a “fictitious protective spirit.”

While the exhibition presents a coherent narrative around connections across the diaspora and among many cultures, an early image pairing in the formative years section is a jarring and disappointing insertion. Without a warning about sensitive imagery, three photos are presented side-by-side on top of a vitrine of Black hair care staples. A photo of Fletcher’s family is beside an image of teenagers being doused by fire hoses in Birmingham during the Civil Rights movement, followed by a photo of William Brown being set on fire after he was lynched during the 1919 Omaha Race Riot. The insertion interrupts the exhibition’s otherwise expansive vision of adornment as protection, pleasure, and futurity, narrowing Black historical experience to mere trauma. Based on the artist’s words from a voice note that was recast into third person, the label reads:

In her youth, Fletcher, like many Black children, was made aware of violence against Black bodies, as in the images here of students protesting and the lynching of William Brown, so that she would understand the need to protect and shield her own body from harm. These personal experiences, coupled with the foundational history of violence against Black and brown bodies in the U.S., drives Fletcher to try to understand what freedom is through art and jewelry. Fletcher views adorning the body as a radical act that elevates Black bodies as sacred.

The inclusion raises a broader question: why does Black triumph always have to be tied to violence or spectacle?

In the end, her message was clear that Black jewelry is a continuum, and as in the beginning, ancient Egyptian jewelry bookends the exhibition, as well as her repeated motifs of the lotus flower, eye of Horus, and other hieroglyphics. All of these frame the final crescendo: the 2016–25 “Messengers Collection.” All-black mannequins are draped in gold adornments as avatars or mythical figures, and behind them are pictures of Fletcher modeling these beings that came out of a dream of hers. In a way, her work is the same: knowledge carriers rendered in gold and precious stone.