“As a woman, I want respect for my name. I’m not going to ask for it anymore. I put it into my name. So, you’ll have to say my name with respect. Madame Dolores.”

The multidisciplinary artist known formally as Christiane Dolores Leach moves through the art world as Madame Dolores. She insists on being seen, spoken, and respected on her terms. In a world quick to erase, she made herself undeniable.

The name “Madame Dolores” may evoke a sense of mystery, but her role in Pittsburgh’s art scene remains perfectly clear. She founded no box engagements, a consulting initiative expanding her decades of advocacy, and contributed to programs like PITARTS at the Pittsburgh International Airport and the Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka, among other things.

“This isn’t just work for me or a resume line, it’s a commitment to advocacy,” she tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “It’s about making sure artists, especially the ones who’ve been ignored — get the support they need to sustain their full lives.”

The daughter of a German immigrant mother and an African American father, she grew up in the turbulent 1960s, when history was still being rewritten by those who barely understood its weight. “My mother said, ‘Don’t wave at the police. They beat up Black boys,’” she remembers. “In the 1960s, that wasn’t just a warning. It was survival.”

Leach acknowledges that bits and pieces of her story are missing. She never met her stepmother, a woman who lived as a sex worker in France, an absence that left a permanent gap. It was one of her earliest lessons: survival often demands compromise, and women’s stories are rewritten or erased unless they claim them themselves.

At five years old, Madame Dolores stood in the middle of a party surrounded by adults. “I want to be an artist,” she declared, with the kind of conviction most children reserve for aspirations of becoming superheroes and astronauts. Her childhood was a riot of motion, color, and sound. African dance classes, theatrical productions staged with neighborhood kids, wigs stolen from unsuspecting mothers.

Her parents nurtured this sense of artistic freedom. “Art wasn’t just something we did; it was something we were,” she explains. “We lived it. There was no distinction between music, storytelling, visual arts — it was all part of the same pulse.”

The Madame Dolores moniker stemmed from the popularity of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, a television show that, from 1984 to 1995, glorified excess with host Robin Leach’s signature catchphrase: “Champagne wishes and caviar dreams.” Sharing his last name, Leach couldn’t ignore the connection. She remembers watching, unmoved. “Why do people worship celebrities? Why do they need so much?” To her, wealth wasn’t luxury. It was agency, the power to control one’s own story.

Her first exhibited piece met its first act of censorship before she even knew what censorship meant. Someone took a black crayon and destroyed it. “That moment stuck with me,” she says. “Why would someone try to erase what I made? And then I realized that’s what the world does to people like me.”

But she understood something then: art had weight. It had the power to provoke, to unsettle. And that, she realized, was precisely the point. “The ups and downs, the celebration and the rejection — I learned not to take any of it too seriously.”

Frustration fueled her artistic evolution. Flipping through art history books, she saw herself reflected in almost no pages. “Maybe Frida Kahlo,” she says. “The first two chapters covered Africa — mostly Egypt — and a little on China. But the rest? White, white, white.”

She moves fluidly between disciplines, unbothered by labels. “If I’m not doing any number of these things, I’m probably dying inside,” she says. “When words fail, I paint. When emotions analyze, I write. When everything crashes together, I make music. And when something needs to burst before explosion, I perform.”

Her work interrogates race, identity, and decolonization; not because it is a trend, but because it is inescapable. “If you stay silent about your pain, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it,” she says, channeling Zora Neale Hurston.

A recent series of drawings examines what language looks like when it wounds. “I read a book on how plants respond to energy and language and I started to draw that. Like, if someone tells you to shut up, what does that look like?”

She remembers being unsettled by the image of the American melting pot. “I knew an artist made that image,” she says, “but even then, I sensed something sinister about it. It was propaganda. Assimilation dressed up as unity.”

Her work — including the exhibition The Book of White People, “The Drawing Room” installation, The Ugly Queen series, and poetry book Tea with Dolores — serve to dismantle those narratives. Add the #notwhite Collective, a group Madame Dolores co-founded with 12 other women artists. “We started meeting to unpack imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy: how our complex identities relate and respond to these oppressive systems,” she says.

Madame Dolores considers music integral to her work. In February, she released JOY, the final album in a four-part series called NAEAMA (the acronym for NAvigating EArth MAnual). Preceding albums in the series include CHAOS, LIBERATION, and LOVE. “It’s my love letter to all the genres of music that saved my life,” she says.

NAEAMA extends into counter-propaganda posters, comic books, videos, and a world-building narrative. Ultimately, she says it is a legacy for her niece, “For that moment when she may need to know how to navigate the earth, with all its beauty and chaos.”

For all her radical vision and unflinching critiques, Madame Dolores is, at her core, a guide. “You can’t demand honesty if you can’t be honest yourself,” she says. “The work of art-making has less to do with medium and more to do with mind. The road to self is bumpy. I am but one of many guides.”