How the Cheetah got his Spots depicts the Olympic Champion runner Jesse Owens in the starting position before a race. The painting is the latest in a series of works by Nikko Washington that revolve around stories of sports stars that taught him lessons about life. “I ran track in high school,” Washington says. “Jesse Owens was revered as a god because of his unbelievable accomplishments.” Owens dominated the 1936 Olympics in Germany, which was hosted by the Nazi regime. Owens earned the respect of many of the people in the crowd, despite their membership in the most white supremacist organization ever to exist. Upon returning to America, however, Owens was snubbed by President Franklin D. Rosevelt, who only invited White olympians to visit the White House. Later, at an event held in his honor at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Owens was forced to arrive on the service elevator, since Black Americans were not allowed to share standard elevators with White people at the time. His own fellow Americans were more hateful to Owens than Nazis. For decades afterwards, until his death in 1980, Owens played a significant role in changing the racist culture of the United States by touring the country and speaking about his success. Washington relates such heroic stories about athletes to the heroes of Afro-American folktales that inform the traditions of Black cultures in Haiti, Jamaica, the Southern United States, and other places throughout the Western Hemisphere influenced by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. These stories are used to relate truths about the world in addition to moral lessons. “They remind me of the Greek myths of hubris and greed taught in American schools,” Washington says. “Unlike those stories, these connect back to a culture that has been suppressed.”