Alma Thomas

Alma Woodsey Thomas was born on the twenty-second of September 1891 at Columbus, Georgia, the eldest of four daughters of John Harris Thomas — a Black business manager of the Columbus Black neighbourhood — and Amelia Cantey Thomas, a seamstress. The family moved to Washington, D.C. in 1907 when she was sixteen, in flight from the deteriorating racial conditions of the post-Plessy Columbus.

She was placed at sixteen at the Armstrong Manual Training High School at Washington, where she completed the secondary education in 1911. She took the bachelor of arts in design at the Howard University in 1924 — at thirty-two — as the first graduate of the new Howard University Department of Art under James V. Herring.

She taught art at the Shaw Junior High School at Washington, D.C. from 1925 to 1960 — thirty-five years of secondary-school teaching — and was the principal art teacher of the Black middle-class Washington of the post-Reconstruction generation. She took the master’s in fine arts at the Columbia University Teachers College in 1934.

She took further study during the closing years of her Shaw Junior High tenure — at the American University School of Art at Washington under Robert Gates and at the principal Washington Color School circle of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Gene Davis — between 1950 and 1960. She retired from Shaw Junior High at sixty-nine in 1960 and commenced at sixty-nine the principal portion of her painting career.

She completed across the following fifteen years the principal colour-field works of her mature career — pointillist concentric circles and parallel bars of saturated colour against a white ground — in a style that integrated the Washington Color School flat field with a botanical and astronomical iconography. The principal series of the mature work are the Earth Paintings of 1968 (including the Pansies in Washington and the Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses, both at the Phillips Collection), the Space Paintings of 1969–1972 (including the Mars Dust, the Apollo 12 ‘Splash Down’, and the Snoopy — Early Sun Display on Earth), and the Late Paintings of the 1970s.

She was given a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art at New York on the fourth of April 1972 — the first solo exhibition of an African American woman at the Whitney. She was given a simultaneous solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art at Washington, D.C.

The Whitney exhibition led to the 1972 acquisition by the White House under the Pat Nixon White House Acquisition Committee of two Thomas paintings — Resurrection (1966) and Watusi (Hard Edge) (1963) — the first acquisitions of African American works for the White House permanent collection.

She died at Washington, D.C. on the twenty-fourth of February 1978 of complications of a hip injury, at eighty-six.

She is honored here as the first Black woman at the Whitney and the White House collections.