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Although her paintings were competent, they were never singled out for individual recognition.

Throughout her teaching career she painted and exhibited academic still lifes and realistic paintings in group shows of African-American artists. She studied painting under Joe Summerford, Robert Gates, and Jacob Kainen, and developed an interest in color and abstract art. A decade later, she earned a Master of Arts degree in education from Columbia University.ĭuring the 1950s Thomas attended art classes at American University in Washington. Herring, granted her use of his private art library, from which she gained a thorough background in art history. She enrolled in Howard University, and in 1924 became the first graduate of its newly formed art department. In 1907, when Thomas was fifteen years old, her father moved the family to Washington, D.C. The family lived in a large Victorian house high on a hill overlooking the town where Thomas spent her childhood observing the beauty and color of nature. Thomas’s family was well respected in Columbus, and she and her sisters grew up in comfortable surroundings. Her father worked in a church and her mother was a seamstress and homemaker. In the years that followed she would come to be regarded as a major painter of the Washington Color Field School.īorn on September 22, 1891, in Columbus, Georgia, Thomas was the eldest of four daughters. Light reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors.” - Press Release, Columbus Museum of Arts and Sciences, 1982, for an exhibition entitled A Life in Art: Alma Thomas 1891 – 1978, Vertical File, Library, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.Īlma Thomas began to paint seriously in 1960, when she retired from her thirty-eight year career as an art teacher in the public schools of Washington, D.C. “Man’s highest aspirations come from nature. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art) Lynda Roscoe Hartigan African-American Art: 19 th and 20 th-Century Selections (brochure. Like them, she explored the power of color and form in luminous, contemplative paintings. In Washington, D.C., where she lived and worked after 1921, Thomas became identified with Morris Louis, Gene Davis, and other Color Field painters active in the area since the 1950s. Her lyrical interpretation of a pond at sunset suggests a blending of these two perspectives.Īs a black woman artist, Thomas encountered many barriers she did not, however, turn to racial or feminist issues in her art, believing rather that the creative spirit is independent of race or gender. Thomas frequently talked about ​ “watching the leaves and flowers tossing in the wind as though they were singing and dancing.” She also liked to imagine seeing natural forms from a plane. Their irregular intervals create a visual rhythm akin to music, while dappled reds, greens, and blue-blacks orchestrate subtle nuances and dramatic contrasts. Broken rows of color pats, a hallmark of her mature style, alternate with emphatic vertical bands. Red Sunset, Old Pond Concerto emphasizes the intensity of a sunset as it overtakes a landscape, penetrating layers of greenery to strike darkening water. Her new palette and technique - considerably lighter and looser than in her earlier representational works and dark abstractions - reflected her long study of color theory and the watercolor medium. Inventories of American Painting and Sculptureĭuring the 1960s Alma Thomas emerged as an exuberant colorist, abstracting shapes and patterns from the trees and flowers around her.