Alma Thomas
Alma Woodsey Thomas was an African-American artist and art teacher who lived and worked in Washington, D.C., and is now recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century. She is the first African-American woman to be included in the White House's permanent art collection. Thomas is best known for the "exuberant", colorful, abstract paintings that she created after she retired 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 and/or Black Abstractionist, earned her teaching degree from University of the District of Columbia. She 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 have been the subject of several books and solo museum exhibitions. The Smithsonian American Art Museum maintains the world's largest public collection of her work. In 2021, a museum sold Thomas's painting Alma's Flower Garden in a private transaction for $2.8million.
Life and work
Childhood, education, and early teaching positions
Alma Thomas was born on September 22, 1891, in Columbus, Georgia, as the oldest of four daughters, to John Harris Thomas, a businessman, and Amelia Cantey Thomas, a dress designer. Her mother and aunts, she later wrote, were teachers and Tuskegee Institute graduates. She was creative as a child, although her serious artistic career began much later in life. While growing up, Thomas displayed her artistic capabilities, and enjoyed making small pieces of artwork such as puppets, sculptures, and plates, mainly out of clay from the river behind her childhood home. Despite a growing interest in the arts, Thomas was "not allowed" to go into art museums as a child. She was provided with music lessons, as her mother played the violin.In 1907, when Thomas was 16, the family moved to the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Describing the family move, she later wrote, "When I finished grade school in Columbus, there was nowhere that I could continue my education, so my parents decided to move the family to Washington." Thomas was also able to access the libraries in Washington, unlike Columbus." Her parents made this move despite that the family "kind of came down a bit," socially and economically, in leaving their upper-middle class life in Georgia. Other writers have pointed to the Atlanta race riots and racial massacre of 1906 as a possible reasons for leaving Georgia. As another example of the racial violence that her family faced in Georgia, Alma's father had an encounter with a lynch mob shortly before Alma was born, her family attributed her poor hearing to the fright from that incident. Although still segregated, the nation's capital was known to offer more opportunities for African Americans than most other cities. As she wrote in the 1970s, "At least Washington's libraries were open to Negroes, whereas Columbus excluded Negroes from its only library."
In Washington, Thomas attended Armstrong Technical High School, where she took her first art classes. About them, she said "When I entered the art room, it was like entering heaven.... The Armstrong High School laid the foundation for my life." In high school, she excelled at math and science, and architecture specifically interested her. A miniature schoolhouse that she made from cardboard using techniques learned in her architecture studies at Armstrong was exhibited at the Smithsonian in 1912. Although she expressed an interest in becoming an architect, it was unusual for women to work in this profession and this limited her prospects.
After graduating from Armstrong High School" in 1911, she studied kindergarten education at Miner Normal School, earning her teaching credentials in 1913. In 1914, she obtained a teaching position in the Princess Anne schools on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where she taught for four months. In 1915, she started teaching kindergarten at the Thomas Garrett Settlement House in Wilmington, Delaware, until 1921.
Thomas entered Howard University in 1921, at age 30, entering as a junior because of her previous teacher training. She started as a home economics student, planning to specialize in costume design, only to switch to fine art after studying under art department founder James V. Herring. Her artistic focus at Howard was on sculpture; Romare Bearden and Henry Henderson described the paintings she produced during her college education as "academic and undistinguished." She earned her Bachelor of Science in Fine Arts in 1924 from Howard, becoming the first graduate from the university's fine arts program. It has been suggested that might have been first African-American or American woman to earn a bachelor's art degree, however Mary Jane Patterson received her BA, in 1862, nearly 60 years earlier.
Post-college career
In 1924, Thomas began teaching art at Shaw Junior High School, a Black school in the then-segregated public schools of Washington, D.C., where she worked until her retirement in 1960; she wrote, "I was there for thirty-five years and occupied the same classroom." She taught alongside fellow artist Malkia Roberts. While at Shaw Junior High, she started a community arts program that encouraged student appreciation of fine art. The program supported marionette performances and the distribution of student designed holiday cards which were given to soldiers at the Tuskegee Veterans Administration Medical Center. Also, according to her reminiscences, "At Shaw, I organized the first art gallery in the D.C. public schools in 1938, securing paintings by outstanding Negro artists from the Howard Gallery of Art."The three and a half decades of Thomas's teaching career, from 1924 to 1960, were described by Thurlow Tibbs, the D.C. African-American art dealer as Thomas's "fermenting period;" during them she absorbed many ideas and influences, and after 1960 from those ideas and influences she would create her distinctive art. While she taught at Shaw Junior High, Thomas continued to pursue her art, her formal and informal education, and activities with the Washington, D.C. art community, the latter often in ways connected to Howard University.
During this time, Thomas painted, especially in watercolor; while her style in the 1930s was still "quite traditional" and naturalistic, she was called a "brilliant watercolorist." Over summers, she would travel to New York City to visit art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and galleries.
During the summers of 1930 through 1934, she attended Teachers College of Columbia University, earning her Masters in Art Education in 1934; her studies focused on sculpture, and she wrote her thesis on the use of marionettes.
In the summer of 1935, she studied marionettes in New York City with the German-American puppeteer Tony Sarg, the father of modern puppetry in America.
In 1936, she founded an organization, called the School Arts League Project, to bring art opportunities to children.
In 1943, Thomas helped James W. Herring, her former professor at Howard, and Alonzo J. Aden found the Barnett-Aden Gallery, the first successful Black-owned private art gallery in the United States. She served as the gallery's vice president. Thomas's association with the Barnett-Aden Gallery has been described as "critical to" and, according to curator Adelyn Dohme Breeskin, the "pivotal" development in, her development as a professional artist." It put her into contact with leading contemporary national artists, which "heightened her awareness of art trends and directions," and it provided exposure to local artists which "both challenged and inspired her."
In the 1940s Thomas also joined Lois Mailou Jones's artist community, "The Little Paris Group. This group of Black Washington artists was founded by Jones and Céline Marie Tabary, both artists and members of the Howard University art faculty. The date of the group's founding is described variously as during the German occupation of Paris, "the late 1940s," 1945, 1946, or 1948. It met either weekly or twice per week, at Jones' studio, the "Little Paris studio," in her home at 1220 Quincy Street NE, in Washington's Brookland neighborhood. It existed for five years. It offered developing artists an opportunity to paint from the model, to improve their techniques -- "developing skills and styles," and "to hone their skills and exchange critiques"—as well as a salon, or discussion forum—to "talk about the latest developments in modern art, particularly as it was centered in Paris." Other members of the group in addition to Jones and Tabary included Delilah Pierce and Thomas, as well as Bruce Brown, Ruth Brown, Richard Dempsey, Barbara Linger, Don Roberts, Desdemona Wade, Frank West, and Elizabeth Williamson. A photo, from Thomas's archives, of a 1948 gathering of the group shows thirteen artists and a male model.
In 1958, Thomas visited art centers in Western Europe with Temple University students in an extensive tour arranged by that university's Tyler School of Art.
Her involvement with the Little Paris Group is said to have inspired Thomas to seek further academic training at American University. One source states that in the early 1950s, "the A.U. art department was regarded in many quarters as 'the' avant-garde art department in the nation." Accordingly, in 1950, at the age of 59, she began a decade of studies at that university, taking night and weekend classes, studying art, including art history and painting. At American University she studied painting with Robert Franklin Gates and Ben "Joe" Summerford. But Jacob Kainen was her most influential teacher there, and would become a close friend for the rest of her lifetime. When Thomas studied with Kainen in fall 1957, he considered her a fellow artist rather than a student. Kainen had met Thomas in 1934, at the Barnet-Aden Gallery, and in 1957, he agreed to take over teaching an intensive year-long A.U. class for six selected top painting students, including Thomas, but the administration allowed 32 students, many of them beginners, to take the class and Kainen quit in frustration after one term.
When Thomas began her advanced studies at American University in 1950, she was still a figurative painter. During the 1950s her style evolved in several major shifts, from figurative painting to cubism and abstract expressionism, with "monumental," dark paintings largely in blue and brown tones, to beginning to embrace the bright colors that she would later use in her signature style.