Big, Bad Beautiful Brown: Genesis

Big Bad Beautiful Brown came about when I was working with my friend Charlotte Sherman. Charlotte and I met online in 2009 when I contributed to her Kickstarter - she hoped to fund a trip to Mississippi to do research for a book she was writing. The subject was a contemporary lynching. I had been having dreams and visions of lynchings and was doing drawings of them. Both of us were sure the police were lying when they said bodies hanging from trees were suicides (most notably a man with his hands zip tied behind him.) At the time I read about these events I couldn’t talk to anyone - who wants to talk about such a loaded subject? But Charlotte was thinking about this too. I supported her Kickstarter, lent her my art, and we became friends. 

Over the next years, Charlotte developed an impressive website about lynching called “Requiem for 10,000 Souls.” I was one of her support team. At the same time she was writing a book for children, to give them positive feelings about their skin color. We talked about black teen suicide rising, combined with research showing children with brown skin choose pink baby dolls as “better” and “smarter”. Charlotte told me, “if you ask people their favorite color only 1% choose brown.”

“But that’s my favorite color!” I exclaimed. 

And thus was born my idea of sharing my love of browns. I’ve since learned a lot about colorism worldwide and I hope these books create openings for conversations around skin color. 

To make the pages for 200 books, I’ve worked the last few years painting paper and dying cloth. I’ve learned brown can tip toward purple, red, ochre, green, orange, grey, black, blue. Browns look exquisite paired with greens, teals, and many other colors. I never get tired of the range of

colors, the rich mixes, the surprises in browns. I love all the combinations. And it seems that the world is shifting: brown is trending as a favorite color in textile design and interior design. Also, in 2019, black women won the Miss America, Miss Teen USA, and Miss USA pageants for the first time in history. Walmart is selling a Rosa Parks Barbie doll. Target has a black Barbie with a science set and a black Ken. Here in 2020, even as our political leadership seems more aggressively white-centric, it feels that the overall cultural zeitgeist is shifting. It’s like watching water running under ice.