Imagine!

"In Colón's newest wordless tribute to creativity, a young child kindles his imagination during an art museum visit. A boy (gendered in the author's note) emerges onto the city street with a skateboard in hand. The young skateboarder drifts through the city and over a bridge, ending up at the Museum of Modern Art. Inside, he surrenders his skateboard at a checkroom and strides into the museum. Similar to his previous reflection on imagination, Draw! (2014), Colón's latest again challenges readers to discover inspiration through ingenious means. Wonder fills the boy's face as he observes the…

"A boy leaves a row house with his skateboard and rides through his unidentified urban neighborhood; readers can almost immediately orient themselves as he crosses the Brooklyn Bridge and arrives at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. From here Colón’s latest wordless picture book (Draw!, rev. 9/14) becomes a love letter to the experience of visiting an art museum: as the (brown-skinned) boy marvels at Matisse’s Icarus (identified in an author’s note), the cutout figure peels itself from the painting to dance with him, its lithe limbs swaying with movement over the next several pages.…

"A young boy skateboards across the Brooklyn Bridge to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. There he encounters works by some of the most famous artists in the collection: Rousseau, Picasso, and Matisse. The enchanting figures leap off their canvases and join the boy on a tour of the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, Times Square, and Coney Island before returning to their frames. On his way home, the newly inspired child envisions painting murals on the sides of the buildings he passes and falls asleep with his head filled with the images he’s internalized. In an author’s note, Colón…

A brown-skinned boy, living in a New York City borough, rides his skateboard into Manhattan to visit the Museum of Modern Art for the first time. After viewing several revered paintings, the boy’s inspired imagination enables him to enter one of the pictures and then lead the characters out of three separate works of art. He and seven of the images, including a dog and a lion, dance out of the museum. They all spend the day experiencing some New York City highlights, such as the Statue of Liberty and the Coney Island Cyclone roller coaster, eating hot dogs from a street vendor and having a…

Raul Colón's (Bookjoy, Wordjoy) Imagine! is a joyful, wordless exploration of artistic discovery.
As a young boy leaves his apartment, helmeted and with a skateboard under his arm, a journey of possibilities begins. He rides his skateboard through a series of paneled spreads, bringing him past hallmarks of big-city living. Muted beige buildings and bridges--destined, we later find out, to be canvases for more vivid colors--are illustrated with great attention to depth, with Colón's use of Prismacolor and lithograph pencils creating fingerprint-like designs in the watercolor art.
Upon reaching…

Discover: Imagine! by Raul Colón is a vibrant tribute to the power of art and the pull of an iconic city.