The artist's name is seldom found in history books, if at all. Following her retirement from teaching art, at the age of sixty, Alma Thomas veered from a figurative practice to an abstract style that defies time and classification. A long-time resident of Washington, D.C., she has been associated with the Washington Color School. A Black woman in an art world dominated by Abstract Expressionist white males, she did not seek fame and also stayed away from her peers' activism during the civil rights movement. She was honored when in 1972 at the age of eighty-one she had a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a first for an African-American woman. Over the past decades, she has gained recognition locally in D.C. where her paintings can be seen at The Phillips Collection or the Hirshhorn. They are also included in the permanent collections of institutions like The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas is the latest exhibition of her work taking place at the Smithsonian American Museum of Art which "holds the largest public collection of Thomas's works in the world". About thirty of her paintings are on display for the show dedicated to her late years, starting in the sixties.
The Patent Office building, oldest public construction in Washington, now holds the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. The wide corridors leading to the galleries are lined up with paintings and on the second floor, two works from Alma Thomas are an irresistible call to view the show. Resurrection (1966), a rather small sized square painting belongs to the White House's collection and was prominently displayed during the Obama administration. Centered on a pale green orb, an explosion of colors going through the gamut of the color wheel radiates in circles, from a cold blue to a sunny yellow trying to spill beyond the canvas. On the other side, Atmospheric Effects I (1970) is a calming blue field interrupted by small bands of burning red and yellow and a few notes of tranquil green. The paint drips at the bottom as if the work is still in progress, evoking the ever-changing state of nature.
Space, the first theme reflects Thomas's interest in technology, science, and the Apollo mission she watched on television, which provided photographs of the Earth from space inspiring the artist for Snoopy-Early Sun Display on Earth (1970) and Blast Off made the same year, a painting which now belongs to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Antares (1972), a monochrome rendition of the bright star, shimmers due to the innumerable red thick strokes aligned in vertical stripes on the white canvas. The biggest piece in this room, The Eclipse (1970), is built with the same pattern than Renaissance including the color scheme. The story of the rare and fleeting event is told with an off-centered dark orb, the moon, moving across the canvas.
Upon entering the next room labelled Nature and Earth, I felt overcome by joy. For her series about nature, the artist revisited her childhood's memories or just looked at her backyard through the window of her kitchen-studio. Rows of horizontal lines of colored patches for Light Blue Nursery, 1968, or vertical white lines on a green background for Snow Reflections on Pond, 1973, Thomas adopts the same technique for the abstract paintings about nature, yet they generate different emotions, one of happiness, the other of melancholy. Fall Begins,1976 or Autumn Leaves Fluttering in the Breeze, 1973, a symphony of reds or oranges, are like a last hurrah before winter. Spring Grass, 1973, a monochrome bright green is all about patterns built with interwoven brisk short strokes of paint on the white canvas. The result is so fresh that we can smell the grass. While surrounded by the paintings, distillate of nature, we can hear melodies, sample perfumes, and feel the warmth or the coolness of the seasons.
The titles of the five paintings assembled in the third room allude to music, a fundamental component of Thomas's practice. Red Sunset: Old Pond Concerto (1972), is found with late works like Untitled (Music Series) (1978), made the year of her death. The display allows to follow her experimentations, introducing what she called "hieroglyphs" like in Grassy Melodic Songs (1976). Her lively works do not reflect her physical decline in her late years and Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music (1978) found in the modern and contemporary art galleries on the third floor, created for her last solo show, is a testimony of the artist's relentless energy.
An art teacher for decades, Alma Thomas was most likely very well versed in the theories about colors, Bauhaus, synesthesia in art, and more. She grew up with music, nature, and of curious mind, stayed abreast of scientific discoveries. She was not engaged in activism, her mission was a search for beauty and happiness. Lost in the colors and rhythms of the paintings, we connect with her as she generously shares a primitive simple pleasure of being alive and answers to our questions: What is beauty? What is happiness?
Alma Thomas's reply makes her work defy time and classification: “Through color, I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man’s inhumanity to man.”
photographs by the author:
"The Eclipse", 1970
"Untitled (Music Series), 1978
display Nature and Earth
