This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Known for her exuberantly colorful canvases filled with abstract shapes
and patterns, Alma W. Thomas had her first one-woman show at the age of
68, after retiring from a thirty-five year teaching career. She
accomplished many ‘firsts’ in her lifetime: in 1924, she was the first
graduate of the Fine Art Department of Howard University; in 1934, the
first African-American woman to gain a Master’s degree in art from
Columbia University; and, 1972, when she was 80, she was the first
African-American woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of
American Art.
Thomas was born and raised in Columbus, Georgia. In 1907 she
moved with her family to Washington, D.C., into the house where she
spent the remaining seven decades of her life. After graduating
from high school, where she excelled at art, Thomas earned a teaching
certificate and, later, a master's degree in art education.
Throughout her life, Thomas concentrated on her art; she painted
part-time while supporting herself by teaching, mainly at Shaw Junior
High School in Washington D.C., where she worked from 1924 until her
retirement in 1960. She attended classes at Columbia during the summers
in the 1930s, and at American University in the 1950s. She was
active in the Washington art scene, and helped establish the Barnett
Aden Gallery and was involved with ‘The Little Studio’, a group of
artists who gathered to exchange ideas and critique each other’s work.
Her work reflects a long study of color theory, watercolor, and
abstraction, and even exploration of costume and marionette
design. Thomas's early art was realistic, but while at Howard
University she became fascinated by abstraction, based on the influence
of her professors Lois Mailou Jones and James V. Herring. When
she was invited to exhibit her art at Howard in 1966, at age 75, Thomas
decided to experiment with a new approach, the type of painting for
which she is best known today: large canvases filled with dense,
irregular patterns made by brushes heavily laden with bright
colors. She found inspiration in trees and flowers around her,
often as seen from the windows of her Washington D.C home, as they
flickered in changing light. She also liked to imagine seeing
natural forms and patterns from a plane, and was fascinated by
exploration of outer space. Her works from the 1970s include
titles such as Launch Pad and Blast Off. Thomas's
mature work has been compared with Byzantine mosaics, to the
pointillist technique of Georges Seurat. She has been associated
with the paintings of the Washington Color School, such as the work of
Morris Louis, Gene Davis and other Color Field painters who were active
in the area from the 1950s, yet her work is distinctive.
As a black woman, she encountered many barriers, but did not turn to
racial or feminist issues in her art. She believed the creative
spirit to be independent of race or gender. A lifelong political
activist, Thomas offered weekly art classes to children from
Washington's poorest neighborhoods, cultivating their appreciation for
art, even when she was suffering from severe arthritis. In her
80s, neither a broken hip nor a heart ailment prevented her from
continuing to paint.
Alma Woodsey Thomas work has been shown in retrospectives at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Museum of American Art, both
in Washington, D.C. Her artwork has been exhibited three times at the
White House.
Sources include:
websites of: ggbb.org; The Smithsonian American Art Museum;
malaspina.org; wikipedia.com; the National Museum of Women in the Arts:
www.nmwa.org.
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Associated with the Washington, DC Color Field Painters of the 1970s, Alma Woodsey Thomas became the first black woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The success of the show took the art world by surprise.
Born in Columbus, Georgia, she had a happy childhood with summers spent on her grandfather's plantation in Fort Mitchell, Alabama where she loved the beautiful landscape, abundant wildflowers and exotic animals, including peacocks. There she began her first experiments as an artist, molding objects from riverbank clay.
Alma Thomas moved to Washington, DC with her family in 1907 when she was fifteen and lived the remainder of her life there except for six years she taught in Wilmington, Delaware and three years she spend in New York City in the early 1930s. She attended Armstrong High School and fell in love with the art room. She took a teaching degree from Howard University, where in 1924, she became the first graduate of its Fine Art Department. She then earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University Teachers College, and from 1925 to 1960, had an art-teaching career in the Washington, DC public schools, beginning at Shaw Junior High School.
During these years, she was an active artist herself and a major force in the Washington arts scene, organizing clubs and art lectures for her students, establishing art galleries in the public schools, and in 1943, co-founding the Barnett-Aden Gallery, one of the first commercial modern art galleries in the area.
Her early canvases were realistic, but by 1959, her canvases were totally non-representational, and by 1964, after her retirement, she was constructing images almost totally from dabs of paint, creating a tight net of color effect. These works were the breakthrough in her career, and Howard University had a retrospective of her work and in 1972, the Whitney Museum had an important exhibition of her painting which had significant positive impact on her reputation.
Much of her inspiration came from the patches of colors she found looking through her window.
Source:
American Women Artists by Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein |
Biography from The Columbus Museum-Georgia:
| Alma Woodsey Thomas was born in 1891, in Columbus, Georgia, the eldest
of four daughters, to John Harris Thomas and Amelia Cantey
Thomas. The Thomas family provided a nurturing environment that
encouraged interest in art and the pursuit of higher education.
With a desire to escape racial tensions in Georgia and to search for
better educational and employment opportunities, the Thomas family
moved in 1907 to Washington, DC, where extended family members had
already relocated.
For Thomas, the move to the nation’s capital meant attending a high
school that offered art classes. She stated, “When I entered the
art room, it was like entering heaven.” (1) Thomas entered Howard
University at the age of 30, graduating in 1924 with the school’s first
degree in fine arts. (2)
For most of her career she taught art at Shaw Junior High School in
Washington, a tenure that lasted 35 years. She also spent much of
her spare time working with African-American children in several
Washington neighborhoods cultivating their appreciation for art.
All the while, Thomas supplemented her teaching activity by attending
classes at Columbia University during the summers in the 1930s and at
American University in the 1950s. Throughout her life she
actively participated in the Washington art scene. She helped establish
the Barnett Aden Gallery as well as “The Little Paris Studio,” a group
of artists that gathered to exchange ideas and criticism.
Throughout her career, Thomas experimented with a variety of artistic
styles. Her early work reflects an interest in figural
representation and forays into costume and marionette design.
Ever the student, Thomas also worked through the influences of Cubism
and Abstract Expressionism until she achieved success with unique
canvases exploring color, nature, and abstraction. Geographically
and stylistically, based on her interest in expressive color, she is
often linked with the Washington Color Field painters, but Thomas’s
oeuvre differs mainly in her utilization of prepared rather than raw
canvases. Thomas may have borrowed from her colleagues, but she avoided
their process of staining canvases.
Furthermore her subject matter divided her from Washington Color Field
painters because by the 1960s her canvases reflect inspiration from
nature and her desire to express it through abstraction. Thomas
stated, “Man’s highest inspirations come from nature. A world
without color would seem dead. Color is life. Light is the
mother of color. Light reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the
world through colors.” (3)
The year 1960 marked the end of Thomas’s formal teaching career
and the beginning of the full-time dedication to her art at the age of
69. She continued to seek criticism from trusted colleagues and
friends while aiming to produce a style uniquely her own.
Thomas achieved national recognition in 1972 when she received a
one-person exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a first
for an African-American woman. (4)
Essential to her abstract work is a post-impressionist impulse toward
painterly form defined by articulated patches of color. (5) For Thomas
this was inspired by views from the windows of her Washington, D.C.
home: the trees, shrubs, and flowers in her city garden as articulated
by a flickering light that varied with time of day and weather.
Layered onto this perceptual experience are her readings of Johannes
Itten’s The Art of Color (1961), and her fascination with the
growing body of data generated by explorations of outer space (titles
of Thomas’s paintings from 1970 include Launch Pad and Blast Off).
This last component may have played a crucial role in Untitled,
a small work that suggests great scale. In it Thomas moved toward
what on the one hand may be seen as a more minimalist bent than
heretofore, but on the other hand may reveal her emphasis on this
expanding understanding of the world: her visual arena suggests immense
vastness modified with details that bring into play encounters of a
more intimate nature.
Sources:
1. Eleanor Munro, Originals: American Women Artists (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 193.
2. For the most complete publication of the artist’s life to date, see Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Alma W. Thomas: A Retrospective of the Paintings (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 1998); also, see Judith Wilson, “Alma Thomas: A One-Woman Art Movement,” Ms. (September 1979).
3. Artists Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis formed the core known as the
Washington Color Field School, the group with which Thomas is
frequently compared, validating the theories behind her combination of
color and abstraction.
4. Alma W. Thomas, exhibition brochure, Whitney Museum of American Art, 25 April - 28 May 1972.
5. Our gratitude to Ruth Fine for her essay on Thomas's watercolors for
the Columbus Museum's works on paper collection publication, Lines of Discovery: 225 Years of American Drawings (London & Columbus, GA: GILES & Columbus Museum, May, 2006).
Submitted by Staff, Columbus Museum |
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Alma Thomas is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Abstract Expressionism
Black American Artists
Modernism
Women Artists
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