Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891-1978)

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ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

An art teacher for decades, Alma Thomas was sixty-eight years old when she first publicly exhibited her own work.  Her career featured many breakthroughs.  Among them, in 1935, she was the first African American woman to receive a Master of Art degree in art education from Columbia University, and in 1972, she was the first to be given a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.  Her initial art was in a realist vein, but after 1966, she created Color Field paintings, which are her best known works; consisting of canvases filled with vibrant divisionist color that have been compared with Byzantine mosaics. The noted critic Harold Rosenberg stated that these images “brought new life to abstract painting in the 1970s.”1

Alma Thomas was born in Columbus, Georgia, and moved with her family in 1907 to a house in Washington, D.C., where she would reside for the remaining seven decades of her life.  She received her first art training in high school and went on to receive a degree in early childhood education from the Miner Teachers Normal School.  After teaching for six years in Wilmington, Delaware, she returned in 1921 to Washington, where she enrolled at Howard University.  Encouraged by her professor James Herring, Alma Thomas majored in art, becoming the first graduate of the school’s Fine Art Department.  After graduation, she became an art teacher at Shaw Junior High School, remaining there until her retirement in 1960.  For her degree from Columbia University, she prepared a thesis on the use of marionettes as a vehicle for the expression of inhibited feelings. 

For more than twenty-five years, Alma Thomas created representational images in which she derived inspiration from the styles of Cézanne and Matisse and from her long study of color theory. She also drew from the many hours she spent visiting museums, where she studied Western classics as well as examples of Byzantine and Asian art, and galleries.  Time in galleries such as those of Alfred Stieglitz provided a further stimulus for her work, while her experience in marionette making also contributed to her developing style.  She had a special affinity for watercolor, and her professional debut consisted of works in the medium.

In 1943, Alma Thomas became vice-president of the Barnett-Aden Gallery, joining Herring and other well-known Washington-based artists in discussions of all aspects of American art.  The gallery was the first in Washington to exhibit modern American art and it introduced relatively unknown black artists to the public.  In 1946, Thomas joined the “Little Paris” group, formed by Lois Mailou Jones and Thomas’s friend Celine Tabary.  The group was composed principally of black public school teachers and government employees, who sketched and painted together and gave one another mutual support.

In 1950, Alma Thomas studied painting with Joe Summerford and Robert Gates at American University.  She furthered her training there in 1957, studying with Jacob Kainen, a leading expressionist painter of 1930s, a printmaker for the WPA, and a curator of drawings and prints at the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum). Kainen encouraged Thomas to paint in swatches of color, which encouraged her to begin to focus on color in her paintings.

Alma Thomas came to know Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and artists of the Washington Color Field group during the 1950s.  In the next decade, a change occurred in her art, as she began to create geometrical compositions of pure color. An influence on her work at the time was a book by Bauhaus artist Johannes Ittenentitled The Art of Color, whose exercises Thomas carried out.  Unlike many other Color Field artists, Thomas did not use masking tape to create edges, instead penciling in rectangles and wedges that she filled with color.  As a result, Alma Thomas's art has a more personal quality than that of many Color Field painters. 

Thomas retired from public school teaching in 1960 to turn to what she called “serious painting.”  In 1966, when asked to put together a retrospective for Howard University’s Gallery of Art, she took this opportunity to “paint something different from anything I’d ever done.  Different from anything I’d ever seen.  I thought to myself, that must be accomplished.”2  It was at this time that she evolved her signature style, playing color against color and over color with small irregular rectangular shapes of dense, often intense color. She called these works “Earth Paintings” because she stated that they were inspired “by the display of azaleas at the Arboretum, the cherry blossoms, the circular flower beds, and the nurseries as seen from above by planes . . . and by the foliage of trees in the fall.”3  Thomas noted that she was inspired by leaves and flowers tossing in the wind and rays of sunrise flicking through the leaves. In response to the era of space travel, she created “Space Paintings,” in which she used deeper and hotter colors to express the energy required to leave the earth. Thomas’s last works concentrated on the power of a single color.

By the end of the 1960s, Alma Thomas was receiving considerable acclaim.  Her show at Whitney in 1972 was followed by a larger one at the Corcoran.  In 1977, she was invited to White House by President Jimmy Carter in recognition of her achievements. Thomas died on February 24, 1978 while undergoing open heart surgery at Howard University Hospital.

Alma Thomas’s work is included in many important private and public collections, including the Akron Art Museum, Ohio; the Art Institute of Chicago; the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina; the Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; LaSalle University Art Museum, Philadelphia; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Tampa Museum of Art, Florida; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; the Columbus Museum of Art, Georgia; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

LNP

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