Alma Thomas

Alma Woodsey Thomas was an African-American artist and teacher who lived and worked in Washington, D.C., and is now recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century. Thomas is best known for the "exuberant", colorful, abstract paintings that she created after her retirement from a 35-year career teaching art at Washington's Shaw Junior High School.

Thomas, who is often considered a member of the Washington Color School art movement but alternatively classified by some as an Expressionist, earned her teaching degree from University of the District of Columbia (known as Miner Normal School at the time) and was the first graduate of Howard University's Art department, and maintained connections to that university through her life. She achieved success as an African-American female artist despite the segregation and prejudice of her time.

Thomas's reputation has continued to grow since her death. Her paintings are displayed in notable museums and collections, and they have been the subject of several books and solo museum exhibitions. In 2021, a museum sold Thomas's painting Alma's Flower Garden in a private transaction for $2.8 million.

Alma Thomas' early work was representational in manner. As a black woman, she focused her work on creative spirit rather than race or gender. Thomas believed that creativity should be independent of gender or race, creating works with a focus on accidental beauty and the abstraction of color.

After further education at American University and influenced by James V. Herring and Lois Mailou Jones, her work became more abstract. Toward the end of her life, her style moved "to a color-filled, impastoed geometric abstraction of tessellated brushstroke patterns." These paintings have been compared to Byzantine mosaics and the pointillist paintings of Georges-Pierre Seurat. Thomas' style has qualities similar to West African paintings as well as Byzantine mosaics.

Her watercolor and oil paintings incorporated the use of (sometimes overlapping) colorful rectangles. She continued to use this technique, in works which explored colors found in trees, flowers, gardens, and other natural imagery. Her painting Evening Glow was inspired in part by Thomas's interest in the colors of natural world: "The holly tree outside her living room intrigued Thomas with designs formed by its leaves against the window panes, and with patterns of light and shade cast on the floor and walls

inside her home." She called her paintings 'Alma's Stripes,' as the overlapping shapes of paint created elongated rectangles. Later works were inspired by space exploration and the cosmos. The title of her 1972 painting, 'Mars Dust,' alluded to news stories of a dust storm on Mars.: 33.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023