A Little Black Girl Floating on the Tides of History

You've heard of Brown v. Board of Education? She helped pave the way. Or, more accurately, she helped us swim there. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE

WHEN I RECEIVED MY BLANK CLAY MASK from the Fort Collins Museum of Art, it immediately began speaking to me.

“I am a little Black girl,” the mask said. Then she asked: “Do you know my story?”

My immediate response was: “I don’t, and anyway, are you sure I’m the right guy to tell it?”

I mean: Haven’t old white guys been old-white-guy-splaining the world for far too long?

Yup.

I received the blank mask as part of an annual fundraiser for Fort Collins Museum of Art. The idea: Provide a blank face to local artists, then sell their wildly decorated masks to museum goers. The mask sale has raised $2 million for the museum in the last two decades, and helped MOA run shows featuring a rainbow of artists. Including this old white guy.

Now it’s my annual challenge: What is the mask trying to say to the world? I’m the medium, they’re the message.

In 2020 (the Plague Year), the mask was saying, “I am a baseball, and do you appreciate how much it hurts to be slugged into…