Alma Thomas, “Light Blue Nursery”, 1968, Acrylic on Canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1891, Alma Woodsey Thomas was an expressionist abstract painter and art educator. As a teenager, she moved with her family to Washington, DC to escape the racism the family experienced in the South. Thomas attended Howard University, where she took classes taught by painter and educator Lois Mailou Jones and impressionist painter James V. Herring, who founded Howard University’s art department.
Alma Thomas graduated in 1924 as the university’s first Fine Art graduate. She acquired her Masters in Art Education from New York’s Columbia University and studied abroad in Europe with the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She was greatly influenced by the techniques of French Impressionism, through the still-lifes and landscapes of Berthe Morisot and Claude Monet.
Through her life, Thomas was involved with the history of black American intellectual life and participated in many organizations promoting such history and culture. Among these was the Little Paris Group, a literary circle of black public school teachers who met weekly in the 1940s. Alma Thomas also served as Vice President of the Barnett Aden Gallery, founded in 1947, as a black-owned non-profit art gallery. The gallery exhibited the work of all artists regardless of race; however, it was one of few places that showed black artists on equal footing with their white contemporaries.
After she retired, at the age of sixty-nine, from her career as an art teacher, Alma Thomas developed her own personal style. Inspired by the shifting light filtering between the leaves of trees in her garden, she began to paint her signature abstractions. Thomas was given her first solo show at the Dupont Theatre Art Gallery in 1960.
Although the work is abstract, the titles summon up specific moods and scenes, such as “Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses” in 1969, the 1973 “Snow Reflections on Pond”, and “Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music” painted in 1976. The colorful rectangular dabs of paint, often arranged in circles or rows, allow the under-colors to emerge through the open spaces.
Alma Thomas died at the age of 86 in 1978 in Washington, DC. During her life she was included in many group shows centered around black artists. It was not until after her death that her work began being included in shows which did not focus on the unifying themes of race or gender identity, but rather was allowed to exist simply as art. Her work can be seen at many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Smithsonian Museum.
Note: The insert image is Alma Thomas’s “Grassy Melodic Chat”, an acrylic on canvas painting done in 1976. It is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.