Thomas, Alma 1891–1978

Alma Thomas 1891–1978

Painter

The Student/Teacher

First at Howard University

Barnett-Aden Gallery

First at the Whitney

Sources

Alma Thomas was a painter who viewed nature as a colorful, abstract mosaic. Through her eyes, leaves fluttering outside her window became a swirling dance of autumn hues, an eclipse would be a kaleidoscope of luminous tones, and a flower garden exploded into brilliant fireworks. “Color is life,” Thomas was quoted as saying in Women Artists in Washington Collections. “Light reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors.” As an artist who began her “serious painting” at the age of 70 and had her first major exhibition at age 80, Thomas’s work reflected a lifetime in art. Though she was an art teacher for 35 years, Thomas also studied and assimilated the styles of artists she admired, merging them with her own profoundly independent vision.

Alma Woodsey Thomas was born September 22, 1891, in Columbus, Georgia. The oldest of four daughters, Thomas lived with her family in a Victorian house surrounded by trees and flowerbeds. Perched above the town, Thomas would catch her first glimpses of the vibrant color contrasts and juxtapositions vital to her later work. Thomas’s childhood was also instilled with the importance of education. Although her hometown prohibited black people in public libraries, Thomas’s aunts were schoolteachers who often brought professors and traveling lecturers to the Thomas home, including Booker T. Washington.

With the desire for a better education for his daughters and concern over the 1906 race riots in nearby Atlanta, John Thomas moved his family to Washington, DC, in 1907. Thomas often recounted the story of her family about to cross the Potomac River: her parents suggested that Thomas and her sisters remove their shoes to knock off every last bit of the Georgia sand so they could begin their new life. In Washington the Thomas’s bought a small brick house on a tree-lined avenue where the artist and her youngest sister, John Maurice--named for their father--would live most of their lives. Soon after, the family encircled their house, like the one in Columbus, with trees and gardens.

The Student/Teacher

Shortly after the move to Washington, Thomas attended Armstrong Technical High School where she excelled in math and science as well as demonstrating a strong talent in architecture. She designed a modern school-house that the Smithsonian Institution exhibited in 1912 when Thomas was just 20 years old. Although she considered becoming an architect, art captured her imagination more thoroughly. By the time she graduated, she had taken every class the school offered on the subject. “When I entered the art room,” she told Eleanor Munro, author of Originals: American Women Artists, “it was like entering heaven.” Becoming an artist, though, seemed like an unattainable aspiration. “When I was a little girl in Columbus,” she told David L. Shirey of the New York Times, “one of the things we couldn’ t

At a Glance …

Born Alma Woodsey Thomas, September 22, 1891, in Columbus, GA; died February 24, 1978, in Washington, DC, after undergoing surgery; daughter of John Harris (a businessman and church worker) and Amelia Cantey Thomas (homemaker and seamstress). Education : Miners Teachers Normal School, teachers certificate, 1913; Howard University, B.S. in fine arts, 1924; Columbia University Teachers College, M.A. in art education, 1934; painting classes at American University, 1950-1960.

Painter, educator. Took courses in art, architecture, and mechanical drawing at Armstrong Technical High School, 1907-1911; taught kindergarten age children at the Thomas Garrett Settlement House in Wilmington, Delaware, 1915-1921; became Howard University’s first fine arts student, 1921, and first fine arts graduate, 1924; began teaching fine arts at Shaw Junior High School in Washington, DC, 1925; attended Teachers College at Columbia University in New York, summers 1930-1933; studied marionettes with Tony Sarg, 1935; initiated School Arts League Project in Washington, DC, 1936; helped found and was first vice president of Barnett-Aden Gallery in Washington, DC, 1943; joined the “Little Paris” group of artists, 1946; studied painting at American University, 1950-1960; retired from teaching, 1960; “Alma W. Thomas, A Retrospective Exhibition” held at Howard University, 1966; first woman to have solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City, 1972; “Alma W. Thomas Retrospective Exhibition” held at Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, 1972; Mayor Walter Washington declared September 9, 1972, “Alma Thomas Day” in Washington, DC; invited to the White House by President Jimmy Carter, 1977.

Awards : Honor Roll of Distinguished Women from National Association of Colored Women’s clubs, 1962; Two Thousand Women of Achievement award, 1972; International Women’s Year award for outstanding contributions to women and art.

do was go into museums let alone think of hanging one of our pictures there.”

Thomas decided to pursue a career in teaching. She began studying kindergarten teaching at Miner Teachers Normal School. After graduating, she moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where she taught arts and crafts for six years at the Thomas Garrett Settlement House. While there, she experienced the joy of teaching and encouraging creativity in young people. Personally, she continued with such creative endeavors as staging carnivals, circuses, and puppet shows. She allowed her students to paint the sets and to design and make all the costumes. To that end, Thomas began attending Howard University in Washington, DC, in 1921 to study costume design. She also moved back into the family home where she would live until her death.

First at Howard University

During her first year at Howard, Thomas met Professor James Herring who was struggling to create a fine arts department at the school. Herring persuaded Thomas to abandon the idea of costume design and to enroll as the first student in his new curriculum. Herring would be a lifelong friend and mentor to Thomas offering support and encouragement as well as bridging her innate creative talents with historical artistic perspective. He gave her access to his private art library which Thomas combed voraciously, thus initiating a study of formal art history and disciplines.

Initially drawn to sculpture, Thomas first painted rudimentary still-life pieces that served as a springboard for later, more adventurous works. While not disappointing to Thomas and her mentor, these early paintings did not meet the high artistic standards the two shared. Thomas was the first graduate of Herring’s art department at Howard, however, and the department’s only graduate of 1924.

With her bachelors degree in fine arts, Thomas became an art teacher at Shaw Junior High School in Washington. Though Professor Herring encouraged her to paint full time, Thomas found the rewards of teaching too great to ignore. She painted part time, however, and teaching allowed her to learn more about communication through art. “I devoted my life to the children,” she told Munro. “And I think they loved me, at least those did who cared about art.” Again, as in Delaware, Thomas used the classroom as creatively as a brush and canvas, designing and staging marionette plays with the students, offering classes in clay modeling, inviting artists and professors to lecture, and organizing clubs and activities.

In 1930 Thomas began spending her summers in New York City working toward a masters degree in art education at Columbia University. She utilized her skills in costume design, sculpture, and painting to focus her studies on marionette plays. She graduated in 1934. The following year she returned to New York to study with Tony Sarg, the world-renowned marionette maker and puppeteer. Her time in New York also offered the opportunity to visit the city’s large museums. Additionally, she acquainted herself with the work of more avantgarde painters at galleries around the city such as Alfred Stieglitz’s “An American Place.” Her knowledge of both the masters and modern artists provided a deep and wide range of influences yet, while she enthused about the new expressionist works she had seen, her own painting retained tradition and historical form.

Barnett-Aden Gallery

In 1943 Herring and Alonzo Aden, an art curator, asked Thomas to help them establish the Barnett-Aden Gallery in Washington. Thomas joined the venture as vice president. In this capacity, she maintained responsibility for fund-raising and cooperated with Aden and Herring in the selection of featured artists. Through her new duties, Thomas met and became acquainted with a number of well-known artists, curators, gallery owners, and critics. She also studied diligently the vast amounts of artwork on display and digested the knowledge available in the constant discussions about art and the art world. Much of what she learned encompassed the transition from the symbolic naturalism prominent in the 1930s and early 1940s to the new Abstract Expressionism. Furthermore, since the gallery customarily featured talented artists regardless of race or sex, it was the first private gallery in Washington to exhibit modern American art as well as the works of relatively unknown black artists.

Two things prompted Thomas to move toward a more abstract style of painting. First was her involvement with the “Little Paris” group formed by Lois Mailou Jones and Celine Tabary in 1946. A group of primarily black school teachers and civil employees, they sketched, painted, and encouraged each other. Following that, in 1950 she began a ten-year period attending graduate painting classes at night and on weekends at American University with such instructors as Robert Gates and Joe Summerford. Summerford based his work on the idea that paintings should be constructed out of paint--meaning, the balance between color and form--rather than a realistic depiction. Naturally, many students at American University, including Thomas, followed this directive and began to introduce abstract ideas into their representational work. As she told Munro, “I was doing representational painting. But I wasn’ t happy with that, ever. I watched other people painting abstractly, and I just kept thinking about it, turning it over and over in my mind.”

In 1957 Thomas studied with expressionist painter Jacob Kainen at American University. Kainen, who maintained that he thought of her as an artist--not as a student--introduced her to members of the Washington Color Field group. Although artistic similarities existed with other members such as Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Howard Mehring, and Morris Louis, the group’s influence on her work was limited to the use of color. The Color Field painters used staining techniques and masking tape in order to give their work a “hard edge.” Thomas, however, spoke proudly of her pencil-drawn rectangles and wedges which she then colored individually. Despite the differences in styles, Thomas’s work sometimes is lumped into the Color Field group.

In 1960 Thomas completed her studies at American University and also retired from Shaw Junior High School after 35 years of teaching in the same classroom. At nearly 70 years of age, she concentrated on “serious painting” until a severe arthritis attack in 1964. “I thought, ‘This is the end,”’ she told Munro. “I’ ll never be able to move my arms again, or walk.” Shortly thereafter, Howard University offered Thomas a retrospective showing of her paintings in recognition of her achievements. Thomas restored her health and creativity, even making new works. “I decided to try to paint something different from anything I’ d ever done,” she told Munro. “Different from anything I’ d ever seen. I thought to myself, ‘That must be accomplished.”’ With the holly tree outside her living room window as inspiration, Thomas created a style that would be her signature: small, rectangular shapes of bright, intense colors merged together in curves, and circles.

First at the Whitney

A series of acclaimed solo shows at other galleries as well as participation in group exhibits of African American artists--though she would be the first to tell you she was not a “black artist”--followed the exhibition at Howard. In 1972, at the age of 80, Thomas had what she called her “banner year,” beginning with New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art’s first ever solo exhibition by a black woman. Later that year Corcoran Gallery held a larger exhibition, including “Alma Thomas Day” on September 9, 1972, in Washington, DC. Both these exhibitions featured the best paintings from her characteristic “Earth Paintings” and “Space Paintings” series, “paintings inspired solely from nature,” she told Shirey. With names like “A Joyful Scene of Spring,” “Alma’s Flower Garden,” and “Azaleas Spring Display,” the earth canvases depict flower beds and nurseries as if seen from a plane. The space series, inspired from the “heavens and stars and my idea of what it is like to be an astronaut, exploring space,” featured “Launch Pad,” “The Eclipse,” and two paintings whose titles use the moon astronauts’ nickname for their wheeled vehicle, “Snoopy-Early Sun Display on Earth” and “Snoopy Sees a Sunrise.” Reviewer Peter Schjeldahl of the New York Times said of the Whitney show, “She is a gifted, ebullient abstractionist . . . [whose] best pictures are loose, gridlike arrangements of more or less uniform vertical brushstrokes, sumptuous and strongly rhythmic in color and full of light.” Such praise was typical of the positive assessments from most critics.

Though her chronic arthritis made working increasingly difficult, Thomas continued to paint, albeit with a softer mosaic touch, and exhibited her canvases through the mid-1970s. An artist who had always painted in her kitchen or small living room, Thomas often worked with one end of the frame in her lap while the rest of it balanced against a sofa or her leg. Turning the canvas to paint the unreachable areas became more difficult after recovering from a broken hip in 1974. A History of African American Artists quoted Thomas as asking rhetorically, “Do you have any idea of what it’s like to be caged in a 78 year-old body and to have the mind and energy of a 25 year-old? If I could only turn the clock back 60 years I’ d show them. I’ ll show them anyway.” In 1977 shortly after President Jimmy Carter invited Thomas to the White House to honor her, a physician suggested that she submit to surgery to rectify an aneurism in her aorta. Preparing for an exhibition at the Franz Bader Gallery, she put off the surgery until the following year. She died on the operating table February 24, 1978.

“I’ ve never bothered painting the ugly things in life,” she told Munro. “People struggling, having difficulty … . No. I wanted something beautiful that you could sit down and look at.” Alma Thomas was an uncompromising artist whose independent vision and unwavering integrity allowed little time for anything else. Having never married, she asked Shirey, “What man would have ever appreciated what I was up to?” It was the right choice, she said, to remain free, to paint whenever she wanted without interference. For Thomas, color was life, and life was art. She told Munro: “People come to me and say, ‘Tell me how to paint.’ I say, ‘I can’ t. It comes from inside you. You have to expose yourself. Nobody taught me how to paint. I had to do it myself.”’

Sources

Books

Bearden, Romare and Harry Henderson, A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present, Pantheon Books, 1993.

Clark, Marjorie, Women Artists in Washington Collections, University of Maryland Art Gallery and Women’s Caucus for Art, 1979.

Foresta, Merry A., A Life in Art: Alma Thomas, 1891-1978, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981.

Munro, Eleanor, Originals: American Women Artists, Simon and Schuster, 1979.

Perry, Regenia A., Free Within Ourselves: African-American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art, Pomegranate, 1992.

Rosen, Randy and Catherine C. Brawer, Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, 1970-85, Abbeville Press, 1989.

Rubinstein, Charlotte Streifer, American Women Artists, Avon Books, 1982.

Periodicals

Ms., February 1979, p. 59.

New York Times, May 4, 1972, p. C52; May 14, 1972, p. D23; October 20, 1973, p. L19; February 25, 1978, p. C24.

Washington Post, September 9, 1972, p. C1.

—Brian Escamilla