Artist

Alma Thomas

born Columbus, GA 1891-died Washington, DC 1978
Alma Thomas with her portrait by Laura Wheeler Waring, Portrait of a Lady (1947, SAAM) in her home, Washington, DC, 1968. Photo by Ida Jervis. Alma Thomas papers, circa 1894-2001, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Alma Thomas with her portrait by Laura Wheeler Waring, Portrait of a Lady (1947, SAAM) in her home, Washington, DC, 1968. Photo by Ida Jervis. Alma Thomas papers, circa 1894-2001, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Also known as
  • Alma Woodsey Thomas
  • Alma W. Thomas
Born
Columbus, Georgia, United States
Died
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Biography

“I’ve never bothered painting the ugly things in life. People struggling, having difficulty. You meet that when you go out, and then you have to come back and see the same thing hanging on the wall. No. I wanted something beautiful that you could sit down and look at. And then, the paintings change you.”

–– Alma Thomas, ca. 1977–78

Alma Thomas was a teacher and artist who developed a powerful form of abstract painting late in life. From the mid-1960s, she produced brilliantly colored and richly patterned works intimately connected to the natural world.

Thomas was raised in a household that emphasized culture and learning. In 1907, her family moved to Washington, DC, in search of greater educational opportunities and relief from racial violence in the South. In 1924, Thomas became Howard University’s first fine arts graduate, encouraged by the art department’s founding professor, James V. Herring. She then began an esteemed thirty-five-year teaching career at Shaw Junior High School. In addition, Thomas earned an MA in arts education at Columbia University in 1934 and studied art at American University during the 1950s. A significant figure in Washington’s art world, Thomas was associated with the Little Paris Group of artists and Howard University’s Gallery of Art. She was also instrumental in the 1943 formation of the cutting-edge Barnett Aden Gallery, among the first Black-owned galleries in the United States.

A talented representational artist, Thomas moved toward abstraction in the 1950s with works like The Stormy Sea (1958, SAAM), but she arrived at her signature style only after retiring in 1960. Spurred by the prospect of a 1966 exhibition at Howard, Thomas began painting with small daubs of vibrant colors arranged in rhythmic patterns, as in Light Blue Nursery (1968, SAAM). With these works, she charted a new path, inventively drawing on artistic practices ranging from French twentieth-century artist Henri Matisse and Bauhaus artist and color theorist Johannes Itten to local artists and peers, including painter and Howard professor Loïs Mailou Jones and abstract painters of the Washington Color School. Thomas consistently found inspiration in nature, as in paintings like Aquatic Gardens (1973, SAAM). Washington’s parks, the garden beyond her kitchen-studio, and memories of roses around her childhood home all proved vital touchstones. Scientific advances, especially early space travel and the new vantage points of Earth it afforded, also impacted Thomas’s work, as in Snoopy–Early Sun Display on Earth (1970, SAAM). Though Thomas attended the 1963 March on Washington, creating three related works, her practice and its attention to color did not overtly engage the civil rights movement. Instead, she emphasized beauty’s restorative power: “Through color, I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man’s inhumanity to man.”

Thomas’s post-retirement paintings earned tremendous critical praise—no small feat for an artist outside New York City. In 1972, she became the first Black woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, presenting The Eclipse (1970, SAAM) and Antares (1972, SAAM), among others. Around then, Thomas reflected on her segregated childhood: “One of the things we couldn’t do was go into museums, let alone think of hanging our pictures there. My, times have changed. Just look at me now.”

 

Authored by Katherine Markoski, American Women’s History Initiative Writer and Editor, 2024.

Works by this artist (1 item)

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      Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas explores the life of this groundbreaking artist and educator. On view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum from September 15, 2023 – June 2, 2024, the exhibition highlights her distinct abstract style, which creates a dazzling interplay of pattern and vibrant color. SAAM holds the largest public collection of Thomas's works in the world and the exhibition features many of the pieces from her most prolific period.

      Melissa Ho, curator of 20th-century art at SAAM, discusses Thomas’s legacy, the artistic techniques she used to create a multisensory experience for the viewer, and the vital role she played in the Washington, DC arts community.  
       

       

      Exhibitions

      Media - 1977.48.5 - SAAM-1977.48.5_1 - 59312
      Local Color: Washington Painting at Midcentury
      July 3, 2008October 12, 2008
      Explore the expressive possibilities of color in this special installation of twenty-seven large-scale paintings from the museum's permanent collection.
      Media - 2010.52 - SAAM-2010.52_1 - 74044
      African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond
      April 27, 2012September 3, 2012
      African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond presents a selection of paintings, sculpture, prints, and photographs by forty-three black artists
      Media - 1967.59.1118 - SAAM-1967.59.1118_1 - 2924
      Artworks by African Americans from the Collection
      August 31, 2016February 28, 2017
      In celebration of the 2016 Grand Opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, SAAM will display 184 of its most important artworks by African Americans.
      Media - 1995.22.1 - SAAM-1995.22.1_1 - 65784
      African American Art in the 20th Century
      The Smithsonian American Art Museum is home to one of the most significant collections of African American art in the world.
      Alma Thomas, The Eclipse, 1970, acrylic on canvas
      Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas
      September 15, 2023August 4, 2024
      The exhibition Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas provides an intimate view of Alma Thomas’ evolving artistic practices during her most prolific period from 1959 to her death in 1978.

      Related Books

      AfAmBeyond_500.jpg
      African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, The Civil Rights Movement, and Beyond
      African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond offers a rich vision of twentieth-century visual culture. An essay by Richard Powell sets the stage: his analyses of works by Sargent Johnson, Renée Stout, Eldzier Cortor, and Alma Thomas give the reader a rubric for considering other works that range from the Harlem Renaissance to the decades beyond the civil rights era, a period that saw tremendous social and political change. The forty-three artists included here worked in every style current during those decades, from documentary realism to abstraction, from expressionism to postmodern assemblage. They consistently touch universal themes, but they also evoke specific aspects of the African American experience—the African Diaspora, jazz, and the persistent power of religion.

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