Denver author and comics artist R. Alan Brooks meets a lot of people at the city’s top-tier art openings and cultural events, from the Denver Art Museum — which weeks ago opened its second exhibit featuring his work — to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, where he’s readying the release of Season 2 of his “How Art Is Born” podcast.
“He came up to me and was really nice. He said, ‘Did you know you’re the only living artist in this exhibition?'” Brooks remembered. “And I said no. It had never even occurred to me to think of it that way.” “Lauren said, ‘Hey, some of the art in this exhibit is the first time he was ever portrayed as Black,’ ” Brooks said. “So I thought it would be interesting to write it from Balthazar’s perspective, of meeting an infant Jesus Christ, and also what it would be like for him to observe the centuries of art that have depicted him as a white person.”
“I think it’s a passive sort of racism,” Brooks said, relating the story of legendary director and writer Melvin Van Peebles, a Black man who early in his career was forced to move to France to be taken seriously.