Join us on Saturday, August 2 at 1:00 PM at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center for an artist talk with Sonié Joi Thompson-Ruffin, held in conjunction with her exhibition Colours: What Colour is Your Gray?, on view June 6–August 22, 2025. A renowned textile artist, abstract painter, and curator, Ruffin explores colour as a living language that carries memory, identity, and healing. Through vibrant abstract paintings and layered textile works, she invites viewers to consider colour as both a reflective and transformative force.
Free and Open to the Public.
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Sonié Joi Thompson- Ruffin
Colour: what colour is your gray?
June 6 – August 22, 2025
Front Gallery | LVAC
“Art is documentation and testimony to our very existence. Let it go and see what happens—it becomes a living record, an unfolding story of truth, emotion, and spirit. We release control, and in that surrender, the work reveals its power. It becomes more than just creation; it becomes a mirror to our deepest truths, capturing the essence of what was once unspoken and allowing us to witness the transformation of the soul." ―Sonié Joi Thompson- Ruffin ©
Colour is not just seen—it is felt, resonating within my body, intertwined with sound, movement, and emotion. Each hue carries its own energy, guiding my creative process and shaping the way I experience the world. Through abstract painting, I capture colour's dynamic energy, allowing it to flow freely, blend, and form spontaneous, organic compositions.
Colour is sacred—it is the language of the soul, transcending the visual to touch the very core of our existence. It shapes our emotions, perceptions, and memories, moving through us in ways both profound and subtle. In my work, I seek to unlock colour’s emotional power, giving it voice and presence. It is not merely an aesthetic choice, but a force that heals, disrupts, and transforms.
In my textile work, colour flows and intertwines with fabric, guiding every stitch and weave. It becomes an emotional language, creating layers of depth and texture that reflect the dynamic relationship between colour and form. Each piece is a living, breathing entity, telling its own story, just as abstract pouring does with paint.
Colour connects us to our past, our present, and each other in ways words cannot capture. It awakens memories, soothes pain, ignites passion, and shapes our identities.
This exhibition invites you to ignite your senses and revolutionize how you experience colour—remember, resist, rise—and hear the truths colour has already whispered to your soul.
Sonié Joi Thompson-Ruffin is a textile artist, author, abstract painter, and curator whose work explores the layered language of colour, cloth, and cultural memory. Her practice is rooted in sharing stories through fabric and abstraction, honoring ancestral legacies and elevating both personal and collective histories. Raised in Southwest Missouri, she completed the Henry R. Bloch Entrepreneur in Public Administration program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Guided by her experience of synesthesia—where sound, colour, and emotion intersect—Ruffin creates art that is both deeply intuitive and profoundly resonant. Her quilts and paintings serve as visual testimony, blending symbolic motifs, rich textures, and rhythmic compositions that evoke a sense of healing, reflection, and remembrance.
Her artwork has been exhibited in esteemed institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Spencer Museum, the Holter Museum, Mulvane Museum, David C. Driskell Center, Spiva Musuem for the Arts, Spelman University, Harvard University, American Craft Musuem. She is a Charlotte Street Visual Art Fellow, an Art Omi Fellow, USA Fellowship Nominee, 2023-24, Delta Sigma Theta Arts & Letters Award | Woman of Courage, Kansas Masters, and the 2000 Kansas Governor’s Choice Artist.
Ruffin’s artwork can be found in the permanent collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Spencer Museum of Art, 21c Museum Hotel Collection, American Jazz Museum, Bibbs Collection, William Gautreaux Collection, Tony Coleman Collection, Williams Collection, Malcolm Henderson, Britton Collection, D.L. Mitchell, Sprint, McDaniel-Hazley Insurance Co., Bell Corp, and Truman Medical Centers.
Beyond her studio practice her public art is visible and alive living at the Leon Jordan East Patrol and Lab, Pembroke Hall Family Foundation, Waldo in Brookside and Truman Medical centers.
She served as the former curator for the American Jazz Museum Changing Gallery for eight years. Sonié serves on the Kansas City Musuem Board, and is a founding member of AAACollective in Kansas City.
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