Five Movements Within (2026)
As a little girl standing in her Great Grand’Mère’s garden, Kansas City artist Sonié Joi Thompson-Ruffin saw what others could not. Around the woman she loved most glowed a rich purple aura. Her father carried what she remembers as a rainbow. Her mother appeared in shades of yellow and gray. While others searched for explanations, her family responded with encouragement, surrounding her with books, music, paint and crayons. When the colors in the box weren’t right, she melted them together and made new ones.
Over more than three decades, Thompson-Ruffin has established herself as one of America’s leading textile artists while also serving as an author, curator, educator and cultural advocate. Her quilts and textile works have appeared in major museums and public collections, helping preserve and extend African American artistic traditions. Yet her recent exhibition,” Inner Colour Movement” at Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, felt less like another exhibition than the unveiling of a philosophy quietly developing over a lifetime. Her use of the British spelling, colour, is an intentional artistic choice, she said, and part of the conceptual language of the exhibition.
Of the exhibition’s eight works, Black Negative Space, challenges the very language of abstraction. “The only thing I see is the colour,” she says. “I don’t see the black.” In her work, black is never an absence. It is a commanding presence — an affirmation of cultural identity, history and dignity. Her Blackness, she says,
is a gift.
Another striking composition, built from ivory strips and irregular shapes on a black field, eventually brought Thompson-Ruffin back to the piano. Only after completing the work did she think of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Jay McShann, whose hands she watched move effortlessly across ivory and black keys in her parents’ home. Colour and sound, she says, have never been separate experiences.
During a recent conversation, Thompson-Ruffin returned again and again to the ways people assign meaning to color — to race, class, power, fashion, money and fear. She was born one of eight children to a dark-complected mother and a very fair-complected father, into a country that believed color could be used to divide people. On her birth certificate, she was identified as Colored.
Years later, a physician gave another name to something she had known since childhood: synesthesia, a neurological condition that allows her to experience color beyond sight — as movement, emotion, memory and sound. Those two words — coloured and synesthesia — might seem unrelated, yet together illuminate the ideas behind the body of work displayed in “Inner Colour Movement.” One word was imposed by society; the other described how she naturally experienced the world. Between them lies an artistic life devoted to freeing color from every label placed upon it.
“We didn’t create colour,” Thompson-Ruffin says. “It was created for us.”
That conviction also shapes the visual language of her work. Curves, layered forms, stitched rhythms and the use of fabric mitigate rigid geometry. “I don’t understand straight lines,” she says with a smile.
Perhaps nature doesn’t either. Rivers curve. Trees branch. Jazz improvises. The straight lines belong to us. Colour belongs to creation.
The child once identified as Colored has devoted a lifetime to recovering the deeper meaning of colour — not as a boundary between people, but as one of creation’s oldest gifts, inviting us to see the world with fresh eyes.
Photos courtesy of the artist
