Woman is the Color Purple

Digital on print.

24x36"

Limited edition 3 of 30.

“Woman Is The Color Purple”

The reason I named this piece “Woman Is The Color Purple” is because Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was one of the first books I ever loved and it never left me. Long before I understood the word womanist, I understood Celie. I understood what it meant to survive, to bloom, to claim yourself in a world that kept telling you not to.
Walker herself gave us the word womanist rooted in the Black feminine tradition of wholeness. Not just survival, but joy. Not just strength, but softness. Not just resistance, but beauty so radical it becomes its own form of freedom.
That is who she is in this painting.

She stands in a field of purple that stretches as far as the eye can see, not lost in it, but of it. Her wide brim shades her face with quiet authority. The book tucked in her arm carries the weight of every story that was told about us, and every story we dared to tell ourselves. The lavender she holds is not decorative. It is intentional. It blooms because she is here.

This piece is my love letter to every Black girl who found herself in those pages. To every woman who learned, maybe for the first time, that her interior life, her full, complicated, luminous self, was worthy of being the center of the story.
Woman is the color purple. She always has been.