Meryt Harding, shown here with Baby Doll, was born in England, She studied Visual Arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design and the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. She has exhibited her work nationally. Meryt has been a world traveler for most of her life and for the last 15 years her oil paintings have been inspired by the people she has encountered during multiple trips to Africa. Her focus has been to document unique dress, culture, and traditions before they are lost in our rapidly changing world. Having lived in the culturally rich town of New Orleans for the last 18 years she wanted to shift her focus here and is now documenting the unique icons and traditions of New Orleans. She responded to the call to artists to document the Baby Dolls for a major exhibit Contemporary at the George and Leah McKenna Museum of African American Art, which opened in Spring, 2015. Responding to the call set her on an amazing journey, photographing, painting and getting to know and become friends with some of these interesting women. She chose to paint almost life size oil paintings framed in lace of two women. The subjects she selected are:
—Merline Kimble, a Baby Doll in the Gold Digger Baby Dolls since the 1970’s. Merline knows much of the history of the Baby Dolls and her grandparents had been Baby Dolls in the 1930s .
—Eva Perry (Tee Eva) who has been a Baby Doll since 2005 when she and Antoinette K-Doe created the Ernie K-Doe Baby Dolls in memory of the late Ernie K-Doe. Both women are passionate and very active in the Baby Doll culture and community, as was Antoinette K-Doe, before her death.