Madison Reporter

Angel dipped her paintbrush from red to yellow to blue on her palette, swirling the colors together as she painted a paper tracing of her hands.

“When you mix all the primary colors together, you're going to get that beautiful shade of brown,” Leopold Elementary art teacher Sonia Valle said to the first-grade student.

Angel held up her hand next to the painting. “It looks like my real hand!”

Valle knows firsthand the positive impact that representation and multiculturalism in art can have on children. Growing up in Jamaica, all of Valle’s favorite art books featured white, British subjects until one day when she met a tourist from Canada who would go on to change her entire perspective of art.

“She said to me, ‘Sonia, look at your skin, you can paint what’s right around you.’ She really opened my eyes,” Valle said.

The tourist mailed her books featuring the paintings of Paul Gauguin, an artist who depicted scenes of life on the islands of French Polynesia. Valle read the favorite book “until it was in shreds.”

For 27 years, Valle has been sharing her passion at Leopold Elementary School. She instills the foundations of art, encourages learners to take pride in their work and displays students’ projects around the school.

This year, Valle will also see her own paintings on display. Her work was selected for the 2024 Madison Municipal Building Art Exhibition, “Everything but the Dinosaur: Art With & About Youth.”

Valle’s colorful collection of 22 watercolor paintings titled “Memories of a Jamaican Childhood” are now being shown in the Madison Municipal Building and the City-County Building until May 30, 2025. Each painting features scenes of life in Jamaica: men fishing, children picking berries, people dancing outside, women storytelling to children and more. Hues of yellow, orange, brown and turquoise create a sense of warmth and joy reflecting the beauty of the landscape.

“As I flip these pictures I see how much Gauguin whose pictures were the first I saw that depicted brown skin people had influenced me,” Valle shared in the introduction of her collection.

Having this collection selected to be featured is especially meaningful to Valle who painted the series in 2009 but “put it on the backburner” following multiple rejections from publishers. But a family friend’s consistent support and advocacy for Valle’s art motivated her to submit her collection one more time.

Her experiences taught her that representation matters.

“I just want kids to really appreciate who they are,” Valle said. “In art class that’s where your imagination runs.”