A prominent abstract painter of the 1960s and 1970s, Alma Thomas was the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the first African American woman to have her art added to the White House’s permanent collection.
Born in Columbus on September 22, 1891, Alma Woodsey Thomas was the eldest daughter of John Harris Thomas, a successful businessman, and Amelia Cantey, a dress designer. The Thomas family lived in a Queen Anne-style home in the Rose Hill neighborhood, so named for the number of homes with large rose gardens. Alma Thomas showed artistic tendencies as a child when she used local clays to make homemade dishes and sculptures. Her maternal aunts were involved in various cultural clubs, and Thomas was exposed to lectures in the classics, history, and Latin, as well as receiving music and art lessons. Thomas would later recall the landscapes of Georgia and Alabama as sources of inspiration in her art, particularly the gardens that bloomed around the Thomas home, which she described as “deeply preserved in my subconscious.”
However, the beauty of the South also came with the prevalent social ills of racism. An increase in anti-Black violence—such as the Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 and a notable incident where a lynch mob confronted Thomas’s father while looking for another Black man—caused the Thomas family to worry about the safety of their family in Georgia. They also worried for their children’s educational futures. Segregation meant that African Americans were not permitted in Columbus’s only library, and because there was no high school dedicated to Black students, Black children were not allowed to continue their public education. In 1907 the Thomas family moved to Washington, D.C., in pursuit of greater opportunities. There they settled in the house that Alma Thomas would occupy for most of her life.
In high school Thomas excelled at math and architectural drawing. After graduation she enrolled at Miner Normal School, where she studied kindergarten education and received a teaching certificate. After teaching for several years at a settlement house in Delaware, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., to study costume design. She graduated in 1924 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, becoming the first Howard University student and perhaps the first African American woman anywhere to hold that degree.
Thomas began teaching at Shaw Junior High in 1925, where she regularly took her students on field trips to D.C.’s art museums. She organized the School Arts League Project, an arts appreciation program for Black children, and invited artists from Howard to display their artwork at Shaw. Thomas also continued pursuing her own career as an artist, earning her master’s in art education from Columbia University, showing her work at galleries, and becoming an active and visible member of Washington’s growing art community. Thomas was the first vice president of the Barnett-Aden Gallery, one of the first Black-owned galleries in the country.
After a long and distinguished career as a teacher, Thomas retired in 1960 to focus her energies entirely on her own art. She continued taking classes at American University and began experimenting with less figurative styles of painting. During this time, she developed the highly colorful abstract style for which she is known. Though abstract, her paintings were rooted in the environment, drawing inspiration from such diverse natural scenes as the landscape architecture of gardens to NASA’s images of space exploration.
Thomas’s proximity to fellow DC-based artists Kenneth Noland, Jacob Kainen, and Sam Gilliam, whose works also emphasized abstract color shapes—means she is often associated with the Washington Color School art movement. But as curator Jonathan Frederick Walz notes, this categorization has been applied retroactively, and the “insistent materiality” of Thomas’s canvases and her continued inspiration by nature set her apart from the Washington Color School. Regardless, her innovative explorations of color and mosaic-like application of paint have assured her status as one of Washington’s leading post-war painters.
Though Thomas had been a fixture of the D.C. art scene for decades, it was in the late 1960s that her work began receiving national recognition. Now in her seventies and eighties, her paintings were being included in more group and solo exhibitions. In 1971 her work was included in the show Contemporary Black Artists in America, held at the Whitney Museum in New York. In 1972 she would have her landmark solo exhibition at the Whitney, making her the first Black woman to do so, and launching her to even greater fame. From then on, her art would regularly be included in museum exhibitions around the country.
Thomas died in Washington, D.C., in 1978 at the age of eighty-six. Three years later a posthumous retrospective exhibition was held at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum). She has since been the focus of several touring exhibitions. In 1998 the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana organized the first major scholarly retrospective of her paintings, and in 2016 the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Tang Museum and at Skidmore College co-organized a major exhibition that introduced a new generation to Thomas’s work.
In 2015 Thomas’s painting “Resurrection” became the first piece by an African American woman to be added to the White House Collection. Today her work can be found in many major museums, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Museum of Modern Art. The Smithsonian American Art Museum owns the largest number of her paintings on canvas, while the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art maintains a large collection of Thomas’s papers.
The Columbus Museum holds an important collection of Thomas’s paintings, watercolors, sculptures, and marionettes, as well as a significant archive of her papers and materials related to the history of the Cantey-Thomas Family in the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley. In 2021 the Columbus Museum partnered with the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, on the travelling exhibition “Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful.” It included rarely seen items from the Columbus Museum’s holdings, including Thomas’s early student works, personal items, and archival photographs. The Alma Thomas Society, named in Thomas’s honor, helps support the continued growth of the museum’s collection of art by African American artists.
