Pandora
My Doll at Joe Coleman's Carnival
Above: My work while it was in progress.
Above, Whitney photographed by Helmut Newton for The New Yorker.
I met my dear friend Whitney Ward playing pool at the long-gone lesbian bar Meow Mix , and I felt a permanent connection immediately. She’s generous, smart, funny, empathetic, and absolutely filthy-minded. When I left Pandora’s Box to go independent, I became her partner in her exquisitely appointed Gramercy Park dungeon. I also became friends with her husband, artist Joe Coleman, and the two of them saw me through so many hard times I can’t imagine how I’d have stayed in New York without them. The burlesque community is important to me, and I met them through Bambi and Whitney, but the community of friends and found family Whitney and Joe are in is my safe space, and you can see most of us in Joe’s paintings. He’s painted me several times.
Above: me in Joe’s Auto-Portrait.
This past November I went to Joe’s birthday party at Keens, where Whitney always manages to outdo herself on the birthday cake front. Every year she finds a new way to work with a designer to come up with a personalized edible work of genius.
Above: Joe at Keen’s in 2024 with his astounding birthday cake.
He told me he was curating an exhibition for Deitch and asked me if I wanted to contribute anything. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I could contribute to sex worker art exhibitions, since none of my work is visual, and had no ideas, but when Joe asked me I said off the top of my head that I’d like to create a doll based on my research findings from the past few years.
This turned out to be one of the most fun projects I’ve done in years, and I generally have a lot of fun projects. I’ve never made a doll before, but I’d made stuffed animals, and I spent a couple of month figuring her out and came up with this:
Pandora at Carnival. Photo by Heather Litteer.
I tried not to name her Pandora, but it just happened. Pandoras, historically, were traveling fashion dolls; also, Pandora was a scapegoat, like Eve, and like sex workers often are; and I was working at Pandora’s Box when I met Whitney. So Pandora she is.
You can’t see it, but she’s got a motion-sensor voice that says, “Put me on,” when people walk close to her. The little zine there (my first zine!), illustrated and lettered by me, tells the story of some of her parts, and has a centerfold photo of her in the middle. It’s a poem written like a how-to booklet.
There’s a lot to her, so I’ll just share a few examples:
She has a little black book with blank pages in place of her reproductive parts. I used to have an elaborate Victorian dollhouse, and I thought I didn’t have any pieces left from it, but when my mother died my sister sent me my embroidery box from my childhood, and there were some items from it, including tiny books with blank pages. I chose a blue one, in honor of the Blue Books of New Orleans, and colored it black, in honor of little black books kept by madams, and left it blank, for potential, in case she turns out to be a poet, like Veronica Franco (and me).
Her face is embroidered with thread from that same box from my childhood.
She has a gold locket in her chest, for all the hookers with hearts of gold.
There’s a lot more — everything came from somewhere and has an additional meaning, including the muslin she’s made from. I had the best time, I tell you.
The opening night was epic — read all about it.
And here are some of the pages from the zine, which was distributed in a limited printing. The zines are bound with red thread in honor of a 1980s sex workers’ rights organization from the Netherlands.
I’m so grateful to Joe for this opportunity, I can’t tell you — I would never have gotten to have all this fun without his request, and now my art piece is in a fancy gallery in Soho!
Finally, here’s a picture of Jonny and me (photo by Julie Atlas Muz) at the gallery with Whitney’s photo of me printed on a towel. She created towels and plates because she wanted to have the souvenirs of the exhibition as part of the exhibition. God I love her brain.
If you can make it to the exhibition, you won’t regret it! You’ve never seen anything like it, I promise. There’s an entire carousel, lots of dioramas and wax figures, and art by many of my favorite artists, including Bambi the Mermaid, Scott Ewalt, Walton Ford and Narcissister.
Carnival, Curated by Joe Coleman
May 3–June 28, 2025
18 Wooster Street, New York
Amazing! I love the doll, the towel, the whole thing. I can't wait to see the exhibit.
What a cool story and exhibition. Thanks for sharing!