WETA Arts February 2023: Alma Thomas
In this month’s special edition of WETA Arts, host Felicia Curry presents the story of an extraordinary D.C. artist, Alma Thomas (1891-1978).
WETA Arts celebrates Black History Month with a special episode about Alma Thomas, the remarkable Black artist and educator who helped shape the Washington, D.C. arts scene in the 20th century. Thomas’ art provided her nationwide acclaim. Yet even as her national recognition continues, it’s in her hometown where her impact as an educator, pioneer, advocate and role model can be felt daily.
PUT IT THIS WAY: (RE)VISIONS OF THE HIRSHHORN COLLECTION
HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN
August 2, 2022 - Fall 2023
This exhibition unites almost a century of work by 49 women and nonbinary artists in a range of media drawn exclusively from the Hirshhorn’s permanent collection. Washington, DC artists Alma Thomas and Anne Truitt are among the diverse group being exhibited, some for the first time, in this full floor presentation.
For beloved D.C. artist Alma Thomas, beauty wasn’t just about art. It was essential to life, too.
The Washington Post
By Phillip Kennicott
November 3, 2021.
By the end of her career, Alma Thomas enjoyed considerable critical and popular success. She was the first African American female artist to be given a solo show at the Whitney Museum, in 1972. Her works were accessioned by major museums across the country, and featured prominently in key exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. But it is unlikely Thomas could have imagined how her reputation would continue to grow after her death at 86 in 1978, so much that she is now one of the most beloved abstract painters of the past century.
The adulation is deserved, but can make it difficult to see her work clearly, a challenge the curators of “Alma Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful” confront directly in a major retrospective at the Phillips Collection in Washington.
'Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful' Review | Bursting with Color Late in Life
The Wall Street Journal, By James Panero, September 8, 2021.
A traveling show brings together over 150 objects to explore the vibrant abstract work of the Washington painter who developed her iconic style in her 60s.
Alma Thomas developed her unique abstract painting style only after retiring at age 68, in 1960, as a Washington, D.C., junior-high-school teacher. She called her forms “Alma’s Stripes” for their tessellated brushstrokes. Bold, rainbow daubs of paint weave together patterns of stripes and circles on canvas. Colors swirl and shimmer in these dazzling compositions. Vibrant hues react against one another. Active brush marks play off a tension between figure and ground.
Miss Alma Thomas: A Life in Color
Film Trailer
"Alma W. Thomas was an overnight success — 80 years in the making.
Born a generation after slavery, Alma Woodsey Thomas grew up in the South, in a home where education was a priority. At 16, with racial tensions high and no further schooling options, her family moved to Washington, DC, where she started her incredible life of firsts: the first Fine Arts graduate from Howard University (1924), the first African-American Woman to mount a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1972), and the first African-American woman to exhibit her paintings in the White House (2009). All the while, she taught art at Shaw Jr. High for 36 years, pioneered educational techniques, traveled the world, and crossed racial barriers. Yet she did not receive national attention until six years before she passed.
Thomas’ paintings grab the viewer’s attention and form an instant connection to their emotions and mood. While her work is easy to appreciate and quick to understand, her life and struggles are not. Through her passion, she persevered through racism and sexism in the art world to achieve a level of prominence, still rare among African-American artists today.
“Miss Alma Thomas” is the first documentary film that explores Thomas’ incredible life. Released in conjunction with a major four-city museum retrospective, thousands will have the opportunity to learn of her life, work, and continuing influence.
Until now, no film has ever been produced to tell her important story."
The Long Sixties: Washington Paintings in the Watkins and Corcoran Legacy Collections, 1957-1982
Curated by Jack Rasmussen
American University Museum at the Katzen Art Center, Washington DC
February 16 – August 9, 2021
"The American University Museum recently acquired 9,000 works from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, a Washington institution that closed its doors to the public in 2014. Together with our Watkins Collection we have an especially strong cache of works by Washington regional artists. While curating a show of Washington paintings drawn from our growing collections, I became interested in how my memories of a formative time in my life might be affecting my choice of artwork for this exhibition.
Every exhibition is an opportunity to address what we can see of the past from our contemporary perspective. My perspective includes the acknowledgement of persistent, systemic gender and racial injustice, bias, and violence that was present in the fifties, laid bare in the sixties, and continues to the present day. It is clear to me that the defining characteristic of most White mainstream art made between 1957 and 1982 in Washington was an adherence to aesthetic and commercial constraints that encouraged artists to remain silent when their voices are most needed. What pushback there was against this tendency was led by Black and women artists, whose work has been systematically underrepresented in the collections of Washington museums."
– Jack Rasmussen, Curator
Featuring Artists: Cynthia Bickley-Green, Lisa Montag Brotman, Allen Carter, Michael Clark, Manon Cleary, Robert D’Arista, Rebecca Davenport, Gene Davis, Willem de Looper, Jeff Donaldson, Thomas Downing, William S. Dutterer, Alan Feltus, Fred Folsom, Robert Franklin Gates, Sam Gilliam, Carol Brown Goldberg, Tom Green, Helene McKinsey Herzbrun, Michal Hunter, Val Lewton, Howard Mehring, William Newman, Kenneth Noland, Robin Rose, Joseph Shannon, Frank Anthony Smith, Carroll Sockwell, Alma Thomas, Franklin White, William Woodward, and Kenneth Victor Young.
View the exhibition and catalogue online in Museum@Home.
EXHIBITION | Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va. July 9, 2021 - October 3, 2021
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC: Fall 2021
The Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN: Spring 2022
The Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA: Summer 2022
Early Alma Thomas and Downing, Mehring, Reed
At Hemphill Fine Arts, a Survey of Washington Color School's Lesser-Known Stars
February 17, 2017
Kriston Capps, Washington City Paper
"It's a Washington Color School resurgence with new exhibitions featuring the work of Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring, Paul Reed, and Alma Thomas."
Early Alma Thomas, and Downing, Mehring, Reed
Enter a universe of dappled color in Howard Mehring show at AU museum
February 9, 2017
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"The Washington Color School is still much discussed in the D.C. art world — some might say too much so — and the artists are enjoying a posthumous commercial boom at galleries here and elsewhere."
Alma Thomas: Thirteen Studies for Paintings
Alma Thomas is Given Pride of Place at the White House
April 17, 2015
Victoria L. Valentine, Culture Type
"The instantly recognizable work of Alma W. Thomas (1891-1978) graces the Old Family Dining Room at the White House."
Alma Thomas: Thirteen Studies for Paintings
Piece of Work: Alma Thomas' "Untitled" at Hemphill Fine Arts
October 30, 2014
John Anderson, The Washington Post
"From a distance, the work appears to be nothing more than a sequence of paint splotches, varied in hue, in only a couple of discrete widths, arranged into haphazard columns across the paper: It’s Gene Davis meets Clyfford Still distilled into overgrown patches of color, like Seurat stipples on an American (read: McDonalds) diet."
Selections from the Dolly Langdon and Aldus H. Chapin Collection
In the Galleries: A Washington Color School reunion
July 12, 2014
Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post
"Made between 1958 and 1986, these 19 works constitute an impressive sampler of Washington color painting, although they include one by an artist who never lived in the District, Karl Stanley Benjamin, and one by a representational artist, Michael Clark (whose 'Lincoln Memorial' features bars of luminous color)."
Viewing Rm.
"Viewing Rm." at Hemphill Fine Arts
February 4, 2011
Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper
"The exhibit is variegated, but like any good combine painting (and those are included too) it coheres pretty well despite itself, as giants like Robert Rauschenberg mix with such local figures as Joseph Mills, Mingering Mike and Colby Caldwell."
Viewing Rm.
Familiar favorites: Once more, with feeling
January 28, 2011
Jessica Dawson, The Washington Post
"Here hang big, striking works by Tom Downing and Jacob Kainen. Here, too, are precious works on paper by Al Jensen and Alma Thomas. That Eugene Atget picture of the taxidermist's vitrine? I'll take it."