Garden of Women Collection

Abstract

This work presents digital editing combined with photography. Combining the theme of Afrofuturism with the significance of the color purple, it symbolizes women empowerment. The color purple has ties to feminism and depicts dignity, sovereignty, solidarity, resistance, and intersectional empowerment. In the early 1900s during the suffragette movement, the significance of the color purple is described as “royal blood that flows in the veins of every suffragette.”

Referencing Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, a prize-winning novel that solidifies purple as a symbol of womanism, the work draws on a term coined by Walker to describe Black feminism. It foregrounds the reality that Black women are powerful, yet also the most marginalized. As Walker writes, “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.”