Douriean Fletcher: Jewelry of the Afrofuture

Douriean Fletcher: Jewelry of the Afrofuture

From October 4, 2025 to March 15, 2026, MAD will present Douriean Fletcher: Embellishing the Black Body (working title), accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. More than sixty examples of Fletcher’s (United States, b. 1987) work as a jewelry designer will be on view, including adornments for costumes designed by Academy Award winner Ruth E. Carter (United States, b. 1960) for Marvel Studio’s Black Panther films. A self-taught artist, Fletcher harnesses the story-telling ability of jewelry design to address Black identity of the past, present, and, most imaginatively, the future.

Exhibition Description

 

In this exhibition, design, craft, and culture are intrinsically linked in jewelry, and the show highlights Fletcher’s approach to her work as a counterculture narrative of Black experience, creativity, and cultural resilience.

Jewelry has a long history as an iconographic vehicle for social, political, and societal symbolism. Often executed in materials held precious, whether brass, gold, shell, or beads, the history of civilization is captured in these objects and tell us what our ancestors valued, how they lived, and how style, aesthetics, and the body are intertwined in the creation of meaning. In addition, technical hand skills passed from generation to generation in the design and making of jewelry keep cultural narratives alive for future generations to decode, learn from, and expand upon.

Fletcher’s jewelry designed for Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the groundbreaking Marvel Studios superhero films, form the core of this exhibition and highlight the artist’s approach to imagining the resplendent and powerful Black body in a futuristic, utopian world. In concert with the costume designs by Carter for the films, Fletcher’s jewelry defines the fictional African nation of Wakanda as free from the design influence of the Dutch, the British and other colonizers. In this way as a designer, she participates in the cultural movement of Afrofuturism and its themes of reclamation, black liberation, and inspired speculation about an egalitarian future.

For Black thought leaders, activists, artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers contributing to Afrofuturistic thought and aesthetics, Black history and experience is reimagined through the reclaiming and melding of a range of African American and African design sources and cultural traditions. This exhibition documents and explores how this theoretical strategy is materialized in Fletcher’s work as a designer of jewelry and body adornments. To do so, the exhibition will highlight her research into African and African American jewelry design and other indigenous design traditions to create original objects of jewelry and body adornment that build aesthetic and cultural bridges between Black communities, countries, continents, and histories torn apart by colonialism, slavery, and its contemporary legacies of exclusion and oppression. The Black embellished body in the Black Panther films is a dignified, beautiful, and powerful body with the ability to actively shape a better world and functions as an important counter narrative for broad public audiences who have internalized negative cinematic representations of Black people as impoverished, traumatized, or criminal.

 

Raised in Pasadena, California, Fletcher learned Black history through the lens of what was taught to her in school: slavery, Civil Rights, and the political activism of the Black Panthers. Sensing a narrow view, she set out to explore the question, “What is Blackness? and “What does it look like to be Black throughout the African diaspora?” She immersed herself in relevant books, films, and music, and traveled to South Africa. The trip piqued her interest in African jewelry for its unusual combination of functional purpose, beauty, symbolism, and storytelling possibilities, and she began to investigate how these concepts might apply to jewelry in her own culture. Upon her return to the U.S., she set up her own jewelry studio in New Orleans, LA. Equipped with brass, aluminum, and copper; decorative elements such as beads, cowrie shells, feathers, bone, wood, and semi-precious stones; and using basic equipment, Fletcher taught herself new techniques and sold her pieces at local arts festivals.

Her early work displayed a strong relationship to Egyptian hieroglyphics and Shamanic jewelry, pieces packed with symbolism that were wire wrapped and required minimal metalsmithing. To expand her repertoire, she studied Benin cuffs and beaded neckpieces, Ethiopian crosses, Ghanaian gold, the adornment of pre-transatlantic slaves, and historic jewelry forms and traditions of many other African cultures and tribes. She became aware of the creative possibilities of wire while studying the contemporary jewelry designs of Alexander Calder and Art Smith and incorporated the material into her practice. As her metalsmithing skills deepened, her creative voice took shape, characterized by her use of oversized and futuristic looking brass and gold neckpieces, earrings, and cuffs with wirework and stones. Similar to the jewelry of her African sources, each piece Fletcher makes is symbolic and narrative, whether about the Maasai and Samburu women of East Africa, the spiritual power of stones, or fictional stories of lost African tribes. Fletcher’s Afrocentric historically informed, and imaginative jewelry caught the attention of Carter, who for the past thirty years has designed clothing for the most consequential films about African American history. Carter invited Fletcher to join her team to work on films as a jewelry designer for Roots, Coming to America 2, and the Black Panther series. Fletcher is first jewelry designer to be recognized by the Motion Picture Costumer Union and she remains unique in Hollywood for in her commitment to designing for the Black body. In addition to her film work, Fletcher continues her independent contemporary practice as a jewelry designer.

Exhibition Overview

Douriean Fletcher: Embellishing the Black Body (working title) will consist of three sections: 1) A recreation of Fletcher’s early studio; 2) jewelry and jewelry designs from her films alongside a selection of costumes by Carter; and 3) jewelry that represents her contemporary practice outside of film.

1)      The Fletcher studio will explore Black identity, as well as the development of Fletcher’s jewelry aesthetic. It will consist of objects, film clips, books, and music representing Black history and experience in the diaspora; Fletcher’s work bench with tools and materials; jewelry from her practice before her film career, and African jewelry examples in MAD’s collection and loaned from other institutions.

2)      The section devoted to Fletcher’s career in film will examine her jewelry within the context of costume and character development. Here, Fletcher’s drawings, comic book sources, design influences, and creative process will be explored and supported by behind-the-scenes video of her at work with her colleagues. The original jewelry and costumes from her films will be displayed and analyzed through the lens of jewelry’s contributions to narrative story telling.

3)      The exhibition will culminate with an installation of Fletcher’s contemporary work in jewelry outside of the film industry, revealing the evolution of her practice from 2008 to the present.

MAD is ideally positioned to present this solo exhibition of Douriean Fletcher’s work and will honor the way her career and designs moves across and between the worlds of fine art, design, material culture, handcraft, and Hollywood film. Since 1956, MAD has mounted over 150 exhibitions dedicated to jewelry made by artists, designers, and craftspeople inspired by aesthetic traditions and materials outside the bounds of western European jewelry history or the contemporary commercial market. One-third of MAD’s collection consists of art jewelry, the curatorial team has extensive expertise in the field, and there is a dedicated gallery designed to exhibit the medium.  As the field broadens to include more voices, MAD continues to be on the forefront of presenting innovative jewelry artists to its audiences, who anticipate being surprised by and learning from the unexpected in design.