In Search of the Color Purple by Salamishah Tillet

Author:Salamishah Tillet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2021-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

6. LET THE FILM ROLL

I saw Shug give Celie her first kiss. Cupping Celie’s chin ever so lightly, Shug stared at her newfound lover and warmly invited their lips to touch. Celie, in wonder, looked upward, and through Shug’s eyes saw herself as worthy and desirable for the first time. Their caress, frozen in time, hung above me as I walked around the Art Gallery of Ontario in a room entirely dedicated to enormous images of their relationship as it unfolded in Spielberg’s movie.

Together at Femmes Noires, the featured exhibition of Mickalene Thomas, an internationally celebrated African American visual artist, these images from The Color Purple took up an entire room at the Art Gallery of Ontario for four months beginning November 2018, and then again at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans in a show that opened in November 2019. Inspired by watching the movie with her partner, Racquel Chevremont, in a hotel room in Brussels in 2015, Thomas started photographing stills of Spielberg’s film. Over the next few months, through an elaborate procedure, Mickalene processed her negatives and turned them into images with translucent pinks, grays, and purples. Attaching reflective acrylic to her photographs, Thomas made her images wall-size, so we could see Celie and Shug as she did when she first saw them herself.

At thirteen, Mickalene asked her mother, Sandra Bush, to take her to see The Color Purple in New York City. Curious about the movie herself, Bush bought round-trip train tickets from Camden, New Jersey, in order to see the film. “My mother was very excited to see the movie,” Mickalene told me. “But I also remember her being very surprised by how much abuse the actors reenacted. That was probably one of the first times for her to see that amongst black people depicted in film.” She went on, “And I think that’s why the movie resonated with her. I think she related to some of those women in it.” Sandra’s young marriage to her high school sweetheart was violent, with her teen husband even raping her at gunpoint before Mickalene and her brother were born. Divorcing him shortly thereafter, Sandra, at six-foot-one, pursued a career in fashion modeling while trying to raise her children by herself and, unconventionally, as both Buddhist and vegetarian in the 1980s. Her struggle for money was alleviated a bit when she took up with Eugene, a local drug dealer. Eventually, Eugene went to jail, Sandra became addicted to drugs, and Mickalene was estranged from her mother. When Mickalene asked Sandra to take her to see The Color Purple, she had long been living with her grandmother.

Thomas saw something else.

Now forty-eight, a graduate of two of our most elite art schools—Pratt and Yale—Thomas is best known for her monumental paintings of her “muses,” black women like her mother, former lovers, her partner, Racquel, and occasionally celebrity icons like Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Thomas rose to art-world fame in 2012; her most iconic images show black women in

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