The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker that won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction.
Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. An immortalized cell line reproduces indefinitely under specific conditions, and the HeLa cell line continues to be a source of invaluable medical data to the present day.
Alice Neel was an American visual artist, who was known for her portraits depicting friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers. Her career spanned from the 1920s to 1980s. Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity. She pursued a career as a figurative painter during a period when abstraction was favored, and she did not begin to gain critical praise for her work until the 1960s.
Kehinde Wiley is an American portrait painter based in New York City, who is known for his highly naturalistic paintings of Black people, frequently referencing the work of Old Master paintings. He was commissioned in 2017 to paint a portrait of former President Barack Obama for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, which has portraits of all previous American presidents. The Columbus Museum of Art, which hosted an exhibition of his work in 2007, describes his work as follows: "Wiley has gained recent acclaim for his heroic portraits which address the image and status of young African-American men in contemporary culture."
The Color Purple is a 1985 American epic coming-of-age period drama film directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Menno Meyjes, based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1982 novel of the same name by Alice Walker. It was Spielberg's eighth film as a director, marking a turning point in his career as it was a departure from the summer blockbusters for which he had become known. It was also the first feature film directed by Spielberg for which John Williams did not compose the music, instead featuring a score by Quincy Jones, who also produced. The cast stars Whoopi Goldberg in her breakthrough role, with Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey, Margaret Avery, and Adolph Caesar.
Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas's collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.
The Color Purple is a musical with music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray, and a book by Marsha Norman, based on the 1982 novel of the same name by Alice Walker and its 1985 film adaptation. The musical follows the journey of Celie, an African American woman in the American South from the early to mid-20th century.
Young Girl Reading, or The Reader, is an 18th-century oil painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. It depicts an unidentified girl seated in profile, wearing a lemon yellow dress with white ruff collar and cuffs and purple ribbons, and reading from a small book held in her right hand. The painting is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Beginning with painter Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington, it has been traditional for the president of the United States to have an official portrait taken during their time in office, most commonly an oil painting. This tradition has continued to modern times, although since the adoption of photography as a widely used and reliable technology, the official portrait may also be a photograph.
Oprah Gail Winfrey, also known mononymously as Oprah, is an American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and media proprietor. She is best known for her talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast from Chicago, which ran in national syndication for 25 years, from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she was the richest African-American of the 20th century and was once the world's only black billionaire. By 2007, she was often ranked as the most influential woman in the world.
David Lenz is an American portrait painter.
Betsy Graves Reyneau (1888–1964) was an American painter, best known for a series of paintings of prominent African Americans for the exhibition “Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin” that, with those by Laura Wheeler Waring and under the Harmon Foundation, toured the United States from 1944 to 1954. A granddaughter of Michigan Supreme Court Justice Benjamin F. Graves, Reyneau's sitters included Mary McLeod Bethune, George Washington Carver, Joe Louis, and Thurgood Marshall. Reyneau's portrait of Carver, the most famous, was the first of an African American to enter a national American collection.
Danielle Brittany Brooks is an American actress. She is known for her roles as Tasha "Taystee" Jefferson on the comedy-drama series Orange Is the New Black (2013–2019) and Leota Adebayo on the superhero series Peacemaker (2022–present). In 2015, she made her Broadway debut in the musical revival of The Color Purple, for which she received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical and won the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. She returned to Broadway in the revival of the August Wilson play The Piano Lesson in 2022.
Amy Sherald is an American painter. She works mostly as a portraitist depicting African Americans in everyday settings. Her style is simplified realism, involving staged photographs of her subjects. Since 2012, her work has used grisaille to portray skin tones, a choice she describes as intended to challenge conventions about skin color and race.
President Barack Obama is an oil-on-canvas portrait of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, completed by the artist Kehinde Wiley in 2018 for the National Portrait Gallery. It received a mixed response from the media and the public.
First Lady Michelle Obama, initially titled Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, is a portrait of former First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama, painted by the artist Amy Sherald. Unveiled in 2018, it hangs in the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Washington, D.C. The six-by-five-foot oil-on-linen painting shows Obama, rendered in Sherald's signature grisaille, resting her chin lightly on her hand, as a geometric print dress flows outward filling the frame against a sky-blue background.
Bisa Butler is an American fiber artist who has created a new genre of quilting that has transformed the medium. Although quilting has long been considered a craft, her interdisciplinary methods—which create quilts that look like paintings—have catapulted quilting into the field of fine art. She is known for her vibrant, quilted portraits celebrating Black life, portraying both everyday people and notable historical figures. Her works now count among the permanent collections at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Art Institute of Chicago, Pérez Art Museum Miami and about a dozen other art museums nationwide. She has also exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the Epcot Center, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and many other venues. In 2020, she was commissioned to quilt cover images for Time magazine, including the "Person of the Year" issue and its "100 Women of the Year" issue. With a multi-year wait list for private commissions, one of Butler's quilts sold at auction in 2021 for $75,000 USD.
The Coronation Theatre: Portrait of HM Queen Elizabeth II was painted by Ralph Heimans in 2012 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. While the sitting took place in Buckingham Palace, the Queen is portrayed in Westminster Abbey, standing at the centre of the Cosmati pavement where she had been crowned 60 years previously. The mosaic pavement, referred to by Shakespeare as "the floor of heaven", is rich in symbolism and was created to evoke the "eternal pattern of the universe". It has been an integral part of the coronation ceremony since Henry III of England and is where every English monarch has been crowned for the last 900 years.
The Color Purple is a 2023 American coming-of-age musical period drama film directed by Blitz Bazawule. Marcus Gardley's screenplay is based on the stage musical of the same name, which in turn is based on the 1982 novel of the same name by Alice Walker. It is the second film adaptation of the novel, following the 1985 film directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Spielberg and Quincy Jones. Spielberg and Jones return as producers for the 2023 film, along with the stage musical's producers Scott Sanders and Oprah Winfrey, the latter of whom also starred in the 1985 film.
The American Women quarters program is a series of quarters featuring notable women in U.S. history, commemorating the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The United States Mint is issuing five designs each year from 2022 to 2025 for 20 total designs. One woman will be honored on the reverse of each coin, selected for "contributions to the United States in a wide spectrum of accomplishments and fields, including but not limited to suffrage, civil rights, abolition, government, humanities, science, space, and arts." The obverse depicts George Washington with a new design. Most of the women featured have been from ethnic minority groups.
