Featured Artist
When I was a girl, my mother hated Barbies with a passion and would not buy them for me claiming that the $4 to $6 price of Barbies back in the 70s was way too expensive. I imagine the dolls she had as a girl during the depression cost about 25 cents. She also had a low self image, and Barbies didn't help. Like most parents, I don't think she could imagine giving her daughter a doll with huge breasts and an itsy-bitsy waist, long stiff skinny legs and teeny-tiny feet to play with!
So as soon as I started babysitting and earning some money of my own, I went to Sears and bought several Barbies. I spent hours dressing, undressing and re-dressing the impossibly disproportionate plastic body. I made them clothes and a cardboard dream house with contact paper floors and walls. I used them to roll play adult independence, but mostly dating and married life. Then as I got older, I lost interest in Barbies, but miniature furniture caught my interest, and other artistic pursuits, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture. I have been creating art since I was a child, and started selling it around 30 years ago. And I enjoy doing a variety of crafts as well, like origami, ceramics and needlecrafts.
Time swept by pretty quickly, and at age 35, I noticed that some of the newer Barbies had smaller breasts and bigger feet that were flat on the bottom, and there were joints in the elbows, hips and knees. How revolutionary! But they were still being marketed mostly as stiff, pointy-toed fashion models. I got this idea about making them into female super heroes, action figures, GI Joe competitors. I guess in my 30s, I needed strong female roll models more than ever, and I was tired of the happy-family-skinny-blond-bimbo image since most of my friends and I are not blond, nor are we lean, and we didn't exactly come from happy families. So I made Xena type Amazon warrior women. And that was my first adult experience of altering Barbies.
Now I am one year older than Barbie, approaching 52 and still playing with her. Its like being a kid all over again, an obsessed kid, I probably have at least 200 Barbie or Barbie-size dolls, a few more than the average child. They are not hard to come by. I spend my time altering the Barbie image by making Barbie into a warrior, a social deviant, fattening her, giving her more muscle... For the last 15+ years, I've been repainting, recreating, transforming, customizing them, pulling their disproportioned heads and bodies apart, giving them new images, personalities and rolls. It makes them more real and gives them more meaning. I never thought I'd be doing this at my age, but I have fun, and people like them and want to buy them!
Some of my favorites are the Halloween characters; vampires, witches and demons. Then there are the gay, lesbian, transgender, cross-dressing varieties, Sci-Fi, bikers and aging Barbies with gray hair and wrinkles. I am also very inspired by Japanese doll artists and Kabuki theater type dolls, Geishas and Samurai, martial artists, etc... The Asian theme inspired my White Dragon Samurai Sushi Bar. I try to represent the many subcultures I have been influenced by, including Deaf culture. I use heat to reshape the hands and form them into sign language. Political themes are something I also enjoy. There was Mulan drop-kicking President Bush's butt, and Bushwhacker Barbie with her group of anti-war demonstrators, the altered Barbie Sweatshop diorama and Sci-Fi Barbie in search of a better planet.
I change their costumes, either making clothes from scratch or embellishing manufactured clothes that I find. I create dioramas for them, repaint their faces, give them tattoos, and recycled accessories, sometimes re-root the hair or change the color, or change the entire head, so it isn't blond anymore. If I need a stockier or more muscular body, I'll use a GI Jane type or other action figure. Fat and Fabulous Barbie has a Mimi Bobeck body. Janis Joplin has the Barbie Happy Family Grandma body which is a little bit thicker than some of the other dolls. Barbie is way too thin and keeps getting thinner. If she was a real person, she'd snap at the waist. So my anorexic Barbies are truly skeletal with Barbie heads placed on toy skeleton models.
I like to think the joy and playful sense of humor that goes into my dolls is helping to keep my spirit young. It is also my personal attempt at making a liberating visual statement about girl power, body image, cultural diversity, rebellion, irreverence, even human rights and equality. There really are no limits or rules about what an altered Barbie can express.
Debbie Fimrite is a deaf, Berkeley artist, Japanese-inspired, with over 30 years of experience studying, creating, exhibiting and occasionally teaching art. She grew up in San Francisco and enjoys painting, drawing, sculpture, computer graphics, photography, origami, creating art dolls and altering Barbies. Always interested in art as a means of inspiration, self expression and healing; she was fortunate to grow up in the presence of many supportive artists including her mother who is a painter and sculptor. Over the years she has exhibited in a number of Bay Area Galleries including the Fort Mason Art Center, the Nanny Goat Hill Gallery, Gallery Sanchez, The Tea Spot Cafe, the Japan Center, Red Ink Studios, the Market Street Gallery, Art 94124 Gallery, Age Song Gallery, Expressions Gallery and participated in San Francisco and East Bay Open Studios.
Debbie Fimrite gets much of her inspiration from Japanese Art dolls. Armed with many Barbies of varying body types and sizes, she recreates, customizes, and repaints Barbies and hybrid combinations made from pieces of other dolls. Some of her favorite themes are Deaf Pride, Sci-Fi, Horror and Halloween Barbies, Gay/Lesbian Barbies, Martial Arts dolls and Geishas which represent female beauty, power, pride and ability, anything to break away from the Blonde Princess image. She has auctioned some of her dolls and crafts to raise money for Deaf abuse victims.