Alma Thomas
Alma Thomas
1891 - 1978
African American painter and art educator. Thomas was the first graduate of the fine arts program at Howard University in Washington, DC. After retiring from teaching art in Washington public schools at age of 69, she set up a studio in her kitchen, devoted herself full-time to painting and became a prominent color field abstractionist. In 1972, she was the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition at a major American museum (the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York).
During the years she taught, Thomas kept up with the latest developments in art by attending classes, visiting exhibitions in New York, and being actively involved in the Washington arts community. In 1943, she helped found the Barnett-Aden Gallery, the first modern art gallery in Washington and the first to break the color line. Between 1950 and 1960, Thomas studied at American University where her work began to move toward abstraction.
Few artists emerge in their later years as thoroughly sophisticated and significant practitioners of cutting edge art. In her 70s, Thomas defied these odds to develop a unique variant on color field abstraction. Often linked with the Washington Color Painters—Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis and Sam Gilliam—all of whom she knew, Thomas’s work stands apart. Although abstract, her paintings are prompted by responses to nature, their patterns and colors inspired by the gardens around her modest home and the public parks of Washington. In a work such as Wind and Crepe Myrtle Concerto (1973; Washington, DC, Smithsonian Amer. A. Mus.), irregular mosaic-like patches of brilliant color are brushed in loosely arranged lines over a luminous under layer to create a sensation of backlit surfaces and shimmering movement—ineffably euphoric. Other works such as Pond—Spring Awakening (1972; Akron, OH, A. Mus.) are flatter, the color patches abutting and resembling woven mats. In later works such as Grassy Melodic Chant (1976; Washington, DC, Smithsonian Amer. A. Mus.), color is reduced to a single hue and the pattern is more complex and emphatic. Thomas’s achievement was in reinvesting the contemporary modes of color field, gesture and flatness with a deeply resonant response to nature that evoked formal as well as sensual pleasure. Thomas died in 1978 at the age of 86.
Source: Oxford Art Online
http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2091054?q=alma+thomas&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit
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