Jeanne Walker Harvey

This book about the painter Alma Thomas begins with one of her quotes:

“Through color, I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man’s inhumanity to man.” (1970)

Growing up in Georgia in the early 1900s, Alma’s house was full of color and creativity. Her mother designed dresses and her aunts painted. But outside the house it was different: Alma and her sisters couldn’t enter the museums or the town library, or even attend the school just two doors away, because of segregation against Blacks. So Alma’s parents brought culture to their house, inviting speakers to tell them about people and places around the world. When Alma was 15, her family moved North, to Washington, D.C., “away from the injustices of the South.”

Alma retained her love for artistic pursuits, studying art in college and teaching at the local school. But as Harvey writes, “even in the nation’s capital, schools were still segregated and access to art limited.”

Following the example of her parents, Alma made her home a haven of art and learning and brought in local children.

Not until she was almost 70 years old did Alma begin to focus on her own art. Galleries took an interest in her work, and in 1972 the Whitney Museum in New York City featured her paintings - it was the first solo show by a Black woman. Other museums around the country followed. Alma died in 1978 at the age of 86, but her work continued to attract notice.

When the Obamas moved into the White House, they chose a painting by Alma to be the first artwork by a Black woman to be displayed there and to become part of the White House’s permanent collection. The author writes of the painting that it was “a painting of hope and joy. Ablaze with glorious color. Alma’s colors.”

Back matter includes notes by both the author and the illustrator, a photo of her painting in the White House, timeline and references.

Loveis Wise illustrated the book using vibrant colors and mosaic-like patterns in a reflection of Alma Thomas’s style and her emphasis on color.

Evaluation: I find Alma Thomas’s story interesting, but I felt the author spent too much text enthusing about the bright colors and patterns in Thomas’s painting. I felt she also downplayed the racism that affected so much of Thomas’s life. It almost felt like the book was “cleansed” to be acceptable to the new sanitized white-washed standards of the South. On the other hand, perhaps the focus on the positive and uplifting aspects of Thomas's art will appeal to children more.… (plus d'informations)

Aconcise biography introduces the Chinese-American artist and designer Maya Lin, best known for her architectural plan for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Lin, the child of a ceramic artist and a poet who “had fled China at a time when people were told…how to think,” spends hours as a child playing in the nearby woods and building miniature towns of “paper and scraps.” Lin is in her last year of college when she enters a competition to design a proposed memorial to Vietnam War veterans, to be built on the National Mall. The design had to include the 58,000 names of those soldiers who had died in Vietnam. Lin’s design was chosen in the anonymous competition but was not without controversy when her name was revealed. The illustration of the completed memorial focuses on the wall and Lin’s original concept, built into the earth, rising and falling with the landscape, rather than the compromised result, with statues representing soldiers. Phumiruk’s clean-lined, crisp illustrations, done in Photoshop, and light palette emphasize connections between Lin’s concepts and the strong influences of nature on Lin’s art. The margins of the page containing Harvey’s author’s note about Lin’s work are filled with artists’ and architects’ tools, neatly labeled: ink pens, blueprints, pastels. Harvey provides websites for further information but no specific sources for her work.

Overall, a fine celebration of a renowned woman artist. (Picture book/biography. 4-8)

-Kirkus Review… (plus d'informations)