The Colored Museum is a play by the African American dramatist George C. Wolfe. It had its premiere in 1986 at The Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick, NJ and won its author the Dramatists Guild Award in the same year.
The play features eleven vignettes that satirize elements of African American culture:
"The Colored Museum" was written in 1985 during the post-Vietnam War era. The beginning takes place on an airplane which is traveling through time. The airplane visits different museum exhibits, each of which displays African-American culture and history from the time they were brought to America as slaves all the way through nearly-recent times. Each exhibit displays a different event or lifestyle in different parts of the country during different eras of the African-American experience.
The Colored Museum examines the honor and desire of African-American people to escape centuries of suffering that have been a continuous source of baggage.