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‘Alma’s Stripes,’ And More, As Alma Thomas Takes Center Stage At Chrysler Museum Of Art

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Alma Thomas was born in 1891.

Remember that when considering her spectacular abstractions painted 75 years later.

Also understand that the popular narrative of Thomas’ career–that her “Alma’s Stripes” paintings magically appeared from an unknown artist who only seriously took up a practice upon retiring as a schoolteacher–is complete poppycock. That “fairy dust” scenario discounts her rigorous arts education which saw her become the first fine arts graduate at Howard University in 1924. It discounts a lifetime of drawing, painting, sculpture, costume design, gardening and even puppetry–all outlets for her enormous creative interests. It negates her networking with fellow Black modernists in Washington, D.C. including David Driskell, Loïs Mailou Jones and Sam Gilliam. It attempts to discredit a life’s work and study resulting in one of the 20th centuries most breathtaking artistic inspirations as some kind of fluke.

Alma Thomas was no fluke.

“Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful,” on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, through October 3, provides a comprehensive overview of her extraordinary career including 50 canvases spanning 1922-1977. Several of these works are little known or haven’t been on view for decades; many of her later paintings on display have never been exhibited.

“When I entered the art room, it was like entering heaven, a beautiful place, just where I belonged”–Alma Thomas.

Thomas entered “heaven” at Armstrong Technical High School as a 15-year-old following her family’s move from Columbus, Georgia to Washington, D.C. For the remainder of her life, Washington would offer her artistic opportunities which would have never been possible in Columbus.

She enrolled at Howard University in her 30s to study costume design. She transitioned to the fine art program there. She worked her way up to vice president at Barnett Aden gallery–perhaps the nation’s first Black-owned fine art gallery–in the 1940s. She later took art classes at American University. She became a fixture in D.C.’s thriving Black arts community, a community connected to the wider art world’s trends and ideas. She had gallery representation and visited the city’s numerous art museums.

All the while teaching art for 35 years in the same room at Shaw Junior High School.

“I was not just teaching children how to draw, I was teaching them an appreciation of beauty,” she said.

The year she retired from classroom teaching, 1960, she had her first solo exhibition at Dupont Theatre Art Gallery. It sold out entirely.

Alma Thomas at The Whitney–1972

The myth of Thomas’ spontaneous artistic arrival comes from her solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972 following the development of her now iconic “Alma’s Stripes” paintings in 1966. She was the first Black woman to be so honored.

Considering the stunning extent of this groundbreaking achievement, the esteemed walls in which it occurred and the always insular, always preeminent New York art scene’s ability to rewrite history through its provincial perspective, Thomas was “discovered” in 1972. Not actually, of course, but to New York she was. To the national and international art world she was. What had come before in D.C. was mostly omitted to support this easier origin story.

Her vibrant, intensely colorful, broken brushwork paintings full of energy and life and joy were a complete departure from anything she’d created previously–they were a complete departure from anything anyone had created previously. “Alma’s Stripes” were immediately recognized and admired. They brought her to The Whitney and utterly overshadowed what she’d made previously.

Fortunately, “Everything is Beautiful” avoids this trap. The exhibition includes about 20 canvases made before 1966 along with several works on paper from the earlier years. Also on display are marionettes, costume drawings, prints made with her students and sculpture that far predate her breakthrough mid-60s style.

“These works show Thomas’s drive to innovate while following beauty wherever it took her: the theater, the classroom, her garden, and so on,” Seth Feman, the Chrysler Museum of Art’s deputy director for art and interpretation and curator of photography, who co-curated the exhibition, told Forbes.com. “You get a good sense of Thomas’s early artistic innovation in one section where we installed several paintings in a row—from a still life she painted around 1924; through a series of abstract still lifes she made while taking graduate-level classes at American University in the 1950s; to non-objective paintings she made in the early 1960s. Taken together you see the artist working through form, abandoning representation for abstraction, experimenting with color theories, and ultimately determining to structure her paintings entirely from color.”

While the exhibition reinforces Thomas’ lifelong artistic engagement and how her creativity extended to every facet of her life, it does nod to the undeniable significance of the Whitney show. The Chrysler’s presentation opens by partially restaging that exhibition, including seven large canvases and several works on paper, as well as a recreation of the dress Thomas commissioned to complement her art.

Thomas always had a new dress made for her exhibition openings.

“Light is the mother of color, light reveals the living soul of the whole universe through colors”–Alma Thomas.

Where did “Alma’s Stripes” come from?

While the previous decades of her career produced a respectable and noteworthy body of work for a local D.C. artist, its hardly the stuff of sensation. Hardly the stuff of history at The Whitney. Hardly the type of painting that in 2015 would become the first from a Black woman to enter the collection of the White House as her Resurrection did.

Thomas described the moment inspiration arrived after being approached by Howard University in late 1965 to stage an exhibition. She determined to paint something new.

Feman picks up the story as it has come to be known.

“She sat in her favorite red Eero Saarinen womb chair, looked out the window, and observed the sun streaming through the holly tree in her front yard as dappled light passed through its leaves and cast about her house. She told (an) interviewer, ‘That tree changed my whole career, my whole way of thinking,’” he recounts. “I love the transformation story and photographs by Ida Jervis that show light streaming though Thomas’s holly tree bear out her account.”

Remarkable.

“But I think it’s important to add that Thomas didn’t merely stumble into a fresh idea,” Feman reminds. “She had dedicated herself to years of artistic experimentation, studied art history and followed the latest developments in contemporary art and discussed her observations of optical and natural phenomena with other artists for years. Her innovation was inspired, but it was also hard-won.”

In more ways than one.

By the end of her career, Thomas, who died in 1978, was soaking her hands in hot water to relieve stiffness brought upon by arthritis so she could continue painting. Continue producing her “Stripes.” Continue sending beauty into the world.

Beauty was always central to Thomas. In her Howard University yearbook, she asked rhetorically, “What is more far-reaching than beauty?”

Following its run at the Chrysler Museum, “Everything is Beautiful” travels to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., October 30, 2021 through January 23, 2022, The Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, February 25 through June 5, 2022, and The Columbus Museum July 1, 2022-September 25, 2022.

“When I was a child, we couldn’t go into museums, let alone think of putting our pictures there. Times have changed, just look at me now,”–Alma Thomas.

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