Alma Woodsey Thomas, the eldest of four daughters, was born in 1891 to John Harris Thomas, a successful businessman, and Amelia Cantey, a sought-after dress designer. Alma and her family lived in Columbus, Georgia, until 1907, when the family relocated to the safety of Washington, D.C. following the Atlanta race riots of 1906. They were able to take advantage of Washington’s increased opportunities for black cultural life and stronger educational system.
In high school, Alma dreamed of becoming an architect and of building bridges; upon graduation she prepared for a career as a teacher at Miner Normal School, specializing in early childhood education. Later she received her M.A. in art education from Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York City. In 1921, Thomas entered the department of home economics at Howard University with the desire to pursue a career in costume design. She transferred into the newly formed fine arts department where academic realism was at the core of instruction. In 1924, Alma Thomas graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, the first Howard University student (and possibly the first African-American woman) to hold that degree. She began teaching art at Shaw Junior High School in Washington, D.C. in 1925, where she remained until her retirement 35 years later. Thomas’s connections to other black artists enabled her to play an active role in the Washington art scene and helped her to bring art opportunities to children and the community at large. She continued to pursue her art whenever and wherever she could. Her kitchen table often served as her studio.
Thomas’s inspirations ranged from Asian art to Abstract Expressionism’s explosions of color. She also became a major figure in the formation of Barnett-Aden Gallery, the first integrated private gallery in Washington. In the decade before her retirement from teaching in 1960, she took art classes at American University and subsequently developed professional relationships with members of the Washington Color School, including Gene Davis (1920–1985), Morris Louis (1912–1962), and Kenneth Noland (b. 1924), whose luminous, color-field paintings strongly influenced her. From a conventional realism in the early 1950s evolved the spirited, colorful abstractions that we see here. She began painting with acrylics and quickly developed her own signature style, methodically layering small bars of bright colors that she applied thickly onto light, spacious backgrounds.
Her breakthrough came in the mid-1960s, inspired by the view just beyond her window. Art historian James Porter had just requested a major retrospective of her work for Howard University. She wanted to paint “something different from anything I’d ever done…. ever seen.” As she exAlma Woodsey Thomas, the eldest of four daughters, wasborn in 1891 to John Harris Thomas, a successful businessman, and Amelia Cantey, a sought-after dress designer.
Her Space series reinforced her reputation. Upon its completion in 1972, Thomas became the first African-American woman to have a solo exhibition at a major art museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Later that year the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. presented the eighty-year-old artist with a major retrospective. Prominent art critic Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) declared that her paintings “brought new life to abstract painting in the 1970s.” Her work joined such permanent collections as the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York; and the National Museum of American Art, the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and Howard University, all in Washington, D.C.
With the sanction of these institutions, Thomas occasionally—and ironically—recalled her segregated Georgia childhood, when “the only way to go [to the library] as a Negro would be with a mop and bucket.” Her real battle, however, was with age. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be caged in a seventy-eight-year-old body and to have the mind and energy of a twenty-five year old?” exclaimed the artist, riddled with arthritis, as she embarked upon her Space series. “If I could only turn the clock back about sixty years, I’d show them.” Then she added, “I’ll show them anyway.”
Alma Thomas (American, 1891–1978)
Starry Night and the Astronauts, 1972
