Ivelisse Pabón de Landrón
Ivelisse Pabón de Landrón, the founder of Soy Negra Productions, is a textile artist who crafts dolls featuring characters from Puerto Rican folklore, especially Jibaro figures (farmers and other Puerto Ricans living in the countryside). She is the great great-grand-daughter of a woman who was brought to Puerto Rico in 1834 from Africa to work in the sugar plantation in Vega Alta. Ivelisse grew up in the barrio of the Lower East Side, where her mother was a community organizer. As an adult, Ivelisse relocated to Massachusetts, but then moved to Puerto Rico for a few years. “I wanted to know about my heritage. I wanted to understand the culture, because my dad was black and my mom was white. I wanted to know why the culture was the way it was — the music, the food, the dancing.” Having learned doll making from her mother, Ivelisse went on to do extensive research on the Puerto Rican black doll and sought out older doll makers in Puerto Rico to learn from them. She marketed her dolls at the Plaza in Old San Juan. Ivelisse is passionate about preserving the history of the black doll as a way of honoring Puerto Rican women of African descent and their contribution to Puerto Rican cultural history. A skilled educator, Ivelisse presented her work at a cultural event held at the Park St. Library in Hartford in 2012 and at the Lowell Folk Festival crafts area. Ivelisse relocated to New Jersey around 2018.
She taught the process of Puerto Rican doll-making to Amanda Mercado in the Southern New England Traditional Arts Program in 2012-2013. Ivelisse taught Amanda the entire process of doll-making, from the cultural background to design to selection of materials, shaping the body, embroidering or painting the face and dressing the doll in jibaro clothes. The experience was very useful to Amanda in her career as a social worker with a strong interest in art therapy. Their curriculum/teaching plan is in the institutional archive. Ivelisse also created a PowerPoint presentation that she presented at their final exhibition at the Mi Casa community educational center on Park St. in Hartford.
