Alma Thomas

Alma Thomas was a painter whose widely acclaimed late career abstractions combine a fascination with the environment and technology. Inspired by the beauty of the natural world, she strove to capture its vibrant spectrum of colors and light in her paintings. Thomas also witnessed vast technological advancements over the course of her lifetime, from color television to air and space travel, which found their way into her work. Starry Night and the Astronauts (1972) showcases Thomas’s fascination with America’s Apollo missions to the moon.

Thomas was born on September 22, 1891, in Columbus, Georgia, the eldest of four daughters. Foreshadowing the Great Migration, her family relocated to Washington, DC, in 1907 to escape racial violence in the South and pursue greater opportunity and equality. Thomas earned her bachelor’s degree in 1924, becoming the first fine art graduate of Howard University. She furthered her education through travel, including a formative trip to Chicago to visit the 1934 Century of Progress World’s Fair. She also immersed herself within the DC arts community in the 1940s, participating in an artist working group called “The Little Paris Salon” and exhibiting at Barnett-Aden Gallery along with other leading African American artists such as Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White. Ever-curious and supportive of others, Thomas remained an art student and an art educator for most of her life, earning a master’s degree in education from Columbia University and participating in art courses at American University throughout the 1950s.

After decades as a representational painter, Thomas turned to abstraction, developing her signature style of shimmering, mosaic-like works by 1960. By creating long stripes of color that were broken by thin dabs of white paint or exposed canvas, her paintings appeared to glow as if they were back-lit. These ribbons of color eventually came to be known as the “Alma Stripe” among the Washington Color School, a group of painters with whom Thomas was sometimes associated and that rose to prominence in the surrounding decades.

In 1972, Thomas broke boundaries as the first African American woman to receive a solo exhibition at a major US art museum. Despite the barriers she faced, she was celebrated as an imaginative and impactful figure in 20th-century art. Thomas’s reputation and renown have only continued to grow since her death in 1978, and during the Obama administration, she became the first African American woman to have a painting join the White House Collection.