Alma Thomas was an African American abstract painter and educator. Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1891, she moved with her family in 1907 to Washington, DC, her home for the rest of her life. In 1924 she became the first student to graduate from the fine art program at Howard University, and in 1934 earned her MFA in art education from Columbia University in New York.[1] Thomas was the first African American woman to be given a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York in 1972, and to have a painting purchased for the White House Historical Association collection.[2]
Thomas first entered college in the economics department, studying costume design, but was recruited to James Herring’s new fine arts department at Howard University. After graduating from Howard, she studied to become a teacher at the Miner Normal School, and was an instructor at Shaw Junior High School, where she taught for more than three decades. During this time she studied puppetry and worked with puppeteer Tony Sarg in New York City during the summer of 1935.[3]
In the 1950s Thomas took courses in art and art history at American University and was a member of the Little Paris Group with the artist Lois Mailou Jones. In 1964 she suffered from an arthritis attack and began to move from representational to abstract painting. She began painting professionally at age seventy-one, after retiring from teaching. She was inspired by nature, particularly as encountered during her childhood in the Deep South.[4] Thomas rejected the push to paint “Black” subjects and created works with a more national or international thematic focus “based on a juxtaposition and interaction of colors.”[5] She died at Howard University Hospital in 1978.[6]
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References
Berry, Ian, and Lauren Haynes. 2016. Alma Thomas. New York: Prestel.
Gips, Terry. 1998. Narratives of African American Art and Identity: The David C. Driskell Collection. San Francisco, CA: Pomegranate.
Macklin, A. D. 2000. A Biographical History of African-American Artists, A-Z. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Munro, Eleanor C. 1982. Originals: American Women Artists. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Richard, Paul. 1978. “Alma Thomas, 86, Dies.” In The Washington Post. Accessed January 11, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1978/02/25/alma-thomas-86-dies/a2e629d0-58e6-4834-a18d-6071b137f973/.
Thomas, Alma. 2001. Alma Thomas, Phantasmagoria: Major Paintings from the 1970s. New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.
Endnotes
[1] Gips 1998; Macklin 2000; Munro 1982; Thomas 2001.
[2] Thelma Golden, cited by Berry and Haynes 2016.
[3] Gips 1998; Munro 1982; Thomas 2001.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Macklin 2000:75, see also Gips 1998.
[6] Richard 1978.
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