Zeek Taylor.

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Zeek Taylor is an award-winning visual artist, a writer, and a storyteller originally from Marmaduke, a very small town in the Arkansas Delta region. The son of a beauty salon owner and a postmaster who both loved to dance, Taylor’s contributions to the NWA MaskProject are a spangled black-and-silver top and a pair of red feather earrings his mother wore when she and his father would go out dancing. Taylor also contributed a ring his mother gave to him. He notes that he had his parents support in being who he was completely, embracing his creativity and his identity as a gay man. “It’s easy to love yourself when you’re loved by others,” he says. He writes the following about how the items in his mask represent that feeling:

When I was a child in the 1950s my mother worked six days a week in her beauty shop. With the exception of Sunday church attire, my mother wore nylon beauty shop uniforms and comfortable shoes every day. However, once a month on a Saturday night she would get “dolled up,” and she and my father would go dancing at the Kingsway Supper Club. For those outings, she often wore a black top that was laced with silver threads. She completed the outfit with clip-on faux pearl and red feather earrings. The feathers covered her ears and swept upwards into her hair. I thought she looked like a princess.

My mother loved to dance. When I was five-years-old she taught me a dance her father had taught her, the Charleston. Later my parents enrolled my sisters and me in ballroom dance classes. They drove us once a week to a nearby town for classes so that we would not be social pariahs when we started college. While in class, I noticed students were learning other forms of dance, and I asked my mother if I could also take jazz and contemporary. Even though it was an activity that most boys my age didn’t do, my mother encouraged me to take the classes. It didn’t stop with dance. She supported and encouraged me to pursue whatever would make me happy. She wanted me to be myself.

Years later while attending the Memphis College of Art, I received a full scholarship to study and perform with Ballet South. I studied art during the day, and dance at night. Many years earlier I had learned the Charleston in my mother’s beauty shop on an old linoleum rug. In Memphis, I danced on a stage where Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn had performed.

Each time I danced, I thought of my mother. She was a princess.