In 2023, what does it mean to be a colored girl? But not just a colored girl — an ordinary colored girl. For Vashti DuBois, founder and executive director of The Colored Girls Museum, the experience of being “colored” is layered and not necessarily aligned with its previous socio-political connotations, though it’s related.

DuBois poignantly describes the colored girl experience in terms of the way we are “colored” by others’ expectations, needs and wants. And that coloring can be a dangerous thing. In some ways, I think, it can function as a way to quite literally color over us, erase us, pretend we are not there.

But The Colored Girls Museum is an act of resistance. The first of its kind, this sacred memoir museum honors the experiences, the magic and the otherworldly beauty of the ordinary colored girl. Pulling from her own experiences as a young colored girl, her relationships with other colored girls and observations about the ways this world fails to see the possibilities of colored girls, DuBois has created a monument of sorts, a communal legacy, to affirm Black women and girls and remind the world we are here. And that we are worthy of love and celebration.

Let’s go back to the little version of yourself, when you were a young colored girl trying to understand your place in the world. What cherished artifacts might you have put in this museum?

I was put out of my mother’s house when I was 14, so I had to travel light. The things that were significant to me were my jacks and my balls ‘cause that just reminded me of being a kid, being able to throw my ball up in the air and snatch my jacks and it was portable.

Although I didn’t carry it with me, one of the first artifacts that I put in the museum in our opening season—almost every black family had these dancing white people plates with gold etching around the side of them [and] one day my husband and I were in a thrift store and we saw those damn plates. And we were both like, oh my God, my mother had those. I was like, your mother had those, too. And so we bought them.

One of the memories that I have [and] cherish is that my mom would make coffee every morning, it was like Chock Full o’Nuts, Maxwell House, those things. And so the artifacts that I put in that first show were, I went out and found an old secondhand percolator because the sound of that percolator just reminded me of my mom on a good morning, just hearing it and smelling the coffee [and] those cups with the dancing white people in them. [I’d] sit with my mom and sip her coffee, which always had way too much sugar and way too much cream in it. But I put those artifacts in the museum ‘cause there aren’t many moments that I can remember with my mother that were sweet. That was one of them. And also just that sound, what that it meant to me in the morning. I don’t have a percolator now, but that ritual of getting up and making coffee has always been a part of me.

And then I put my late husband’s yearbook and my yearbook in there because we never dated when we were in school, but we went to the same private school in Brooklyn, New York…and in my yearbook he had written this really beautiful inscription. My son read it when he was like 17 and he said, “Oh my God, mom, how did you not know Daddy liked you?” So, those were the first artifacts when we were building out this museum.

What was the most challenging thing about bringing the museum to existence?

My success is always limited by how well other people can imagine the possibility of me. When people could not imagine my grandmother, she just wasn’t possible. Here’s this big reader who did well in school and she’s a domestic worker. They just couldn’t imagine anything else for her. And so I’m always really aware of and never want to forget that. You can be everything a culture values and not be in the right body for the culture to value it. And that is going to shape the limit of your life. And so the hardest thing is that nobody could imagine a colored girls museum because there’d never been one and it didn’t occur to anybody that such a thing might actually want to exist.

The thing is, when people can’t imagine a thing, not only do they not support it, but they will actively set these little fires around you…this is the first of her kind, so it’s not like I had a model for it. My model was other people’s stuff [and] a place that centered me and people who look like me…and [I had to] push back against all the noise, “What about the men? What about this? What about that? Are you thinking about this? Are you thinking about that? Oh my God, you’re gonna do it in your house? That’s so crazy. Where are you gonna get the money?” All of that. So fighting against other people’s imagination to just put my arms around my own. I didn’t know. I was making it up as I went along, which we should be able to do. That was the hardest part. It’s still the hardest part.

When black women and girls experience the museum, what do you want them to feel?

The first answer to that question is whatever they feel. That’s what I want. What has been just so exceptionally beautiful [and] consistent is folks coming away from it [and saying] “I didn’t even know that I needed this.” And I think about myself. I didn’t like museums as a girl. We always went on school trips and I always had a headache halfway through. I always knew I was an artist. I’m a theater artist, so I was like, I should like these places. They’re staged and these things have stories. I could tell myself stories, but why is it so hard for me? It took years before I realized that the reason I always had a headache was that I was looking so hard for myself in those places, for evidence of me, my story, people who look like me, that it literally gave me a headache.

What are ways that folks can support the work and the mission of The Colored Girls Museum?

So, people can let people know that she’s out there, one. People can begin to imagine with us how there can be colored girl outposts all over this country and all over the world because no one place can purport to tell the story of ordinary colored girls. Our stories are as changeable as our hair and our skin tone. When I conceptualized the Colored Girls Museum, I never imagined that she would take over my home and I would actually have to leave so she could have it…what I thought I was gonna be doing was traveling a series of portraits of ordinary colored girls that are made in every locale, and that would provide an opportunity for any city, any state to essentially create for itself its own monument to ordinary colored girls…that’s a project that we are very much wanting to do.

Another means of support is helping us make that happen. Helping us travel this exhibit to all of these cities and states so the ordinary colored girls around our country and around our world can see themselves installed somewhere as a monument. Because one of the things that I say about the girl herself is that people look at Black girlhood all the time, but they don’t see it. They look, but they don’t see. So what the portrait project invites you to do, no matter who you are, is stare as long as you need to until you see her. Because when you don’t see us, it makes it so easy to do anything to us. And part of what I am on assignment to do is to make sure that we see ourselves first and foremost in all our complexity…these incredible intergalactic creatures from another damn planet. Y’all don’t even know who’s in your midst…and that gives me so much joy. Oh my God. Just the array, the depth, the shape of our beauty. Joy.