Jo-Jo, who does hair at the Lakeview salon Milio’s, has worked as a professional club kid for much of the decade, entertaining patrons at Karma, Red Dog, and Shelter. He has an amazing talent for transforming himself with costumes, wigs, and makeup, so perhaps it’s no surprise that he’s still playing with dolls. It’s something he’s been doing since childhood, when he used to disassemble and rebuild his Barbies to make their movements more natural, he says. He had G.I. Joes too, but he liked to melt them together to make Siamese twins. His mother had taught him to sew, so he could make costumes for his toys. “She never wanted me to depend on a woman,” he says with a wry laugh.
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About ten years ago, when he started hanging out in clubs, Jo-Jo met artist Greer Lankton at the now-closed drag bar Cheeks. “I told her about my puppets, and she said, ‘I make puppets and dolls. You should come over sometime.’” Lankton did window displays at the Alley, and she and Jo-Jo started meeting after work to make dolls together. He learned that Lankton had recently returned to Chicago from New York in an attempt to leave her troubles behind. She told him stories about regulars of Andy Warhol’s world like Candy Darling and Edie Sedgwick. “I’d be like, this woman is cracked,” Jo-Jo says. “She’s having delusions of grandeur.” But Lankton really had been a fixture in the East Village art scene–a transsexual who was a favorite subject of photographer Nan Goldin and an accomplished doll maker whose poignant autobiographical works, such as Raggedy Anns with anorexia, were shown at the 1995 Whitney Biennial and 1995 Venice Biennale. “They seemed like they were alive,” says Jo-Jo of her dolls. In 1996, not long after Lankton’s final show, a re-creation of her Chicago apartment, she died of a drug overdose.
Some of Jo-Jo’s creations take the form of fantastic creatures such as fairies, angels, centaurs, Pan, and Medusa, while others represent people in his life. They’re often anatomically correct, as an angel hanging from a wall with a penis attests. A doll named Pansy, a purple-haired goth with piercings, a fishnet shirt, and motorcycle boots, pays homage to the punk kids who hang around Clark and Belmont. “I want to start making chubbier ones,” Jo-Jo says, “because it’s OK to be a little chubby. I have dreams of making dolls that are in fat suits, and you can unzip them and they come out and they’re in skinny bodies.”
