BMA 1991.98

"Do you see that painting?" she would say to friends visiting her studio. "Look at it move. That's energy and I'm the one who put it there. You know what the scientists say, 'Energy can't be created or destroyed.' Well, maybe I transform energy from these old limbs of mine."

The energy in Alma Thomas' paintings comes from her love of vibrant color. In Evening Glow, patches of orange, yellow, and white appear to float on a field of blue like shimmering reflections on the surface of a pond. A closer look at the painting reveals a surprise: the blue, which appears to be the "background" color, is actually the top layer of paint in most parts of the painting. Underneath the blue layer are areas of orange and yellow. The white is the color of unpainted canvas.

Thomas applied the blue paint in many small vertical strokes, about 3" long and 1" wide. The side edges of many strokes join together to suggest an unbroken blue surface. A gap remains, however, between the upper edge of one blue stroke and the lower edge of the blue stroke above it. This allows the orange or yellow underlayers and the areas of white canvas to show through. On the far left side, Thomas reversed her technique and painted patches of red on top of the blue paint.

Thomas made many paintings using such "swatches" of vivid, lively color. "A world without color would seem dead," she said. "Color for me is life." Alma Thomas was criticized for choosing to paint in an abstract style by people who thought she should use her artistic talents to depict the life of black people or advance the cause of racial equality. Thomas, however, felt differently.

"We artists are put on God's good earth to create," she said. Some of us may be black, but that's not the important thing. The important thing is for us to create, to give form to what we have inside of us. We can't accept any barriers, any limitations of any kind, on what we create or how we do it."

As a little girl growing up in Georgia, Alma Thomas was driven by an irresistible urge to make things. Sometimes she made plates out of clay from a nearby river; sometimes she made objects out of paper cups. This need to "create something original, something all my own" stayed with her all her life.

When she was in her mid-teens, her middle-class family moved to Washington, D.C. Although trained to be a gracious young lady, Alma had an independent and unconventional spirit. She was good in math and science in high school, but found the art room "a beautiful place...it was just like entering heaven." Following graduation, she launched a long career which involved producing costumes, stage sets, marionette plays, lecturing about art history, and finally teaching art for thirty-six years at the Shaw Jr. High School in Washington, D.C. From all reports, she was a tough teacher:

"Alma did not request that her students excel - she demanded that they do so. 'Miss Thomas was a regular tartar,' a former pupil of hers once told me. 'She always expected us to give everything we had to give, and then some, to our school projects.' 'And did you?' I queried. 'Oh yes,' was the reply, 'We were afraid not to.'"

Throughout her teaching years, Alma Thomas continued to be a student herself, first studying art at Howard University In Washington, D.C., then at Columbia University in New York. She visited museums and worked actively to support an art gallery in Washington, D.C. where she met some of the foremost modern American artists. At age 50, still wanting to expand her outlook and improve her technique, she enrolled in painting classes at American University in Washington, D.C. and continued there as a student for the next ten years. She enjoyed the company of the much younger students and always opened her home to them. She had no patience, however, with people who wasted her time, and wasn't afraid to tell people to go away if she wasn't in the mood to see them.

Alma Thomas' most productive years of painting began after she retired from teaching at age sixty-eight. She had already been painting for many years in her own kitchen. Now, with time to call her own, she began to take her own painting seriously. For the next eighteen years, Alma Thomas painted with boundless energy, producing the paintings which brought her museum exhibitions, sales, and international acclaim. She was pleased and somewhat awed by her success. When given a one-woman show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, she said:

"Who would ever have dreamed that somebody like me would make it to the Whitney in New York? I'm a seventy-seven year-old Negro woman, after all, who was born in Columbus, Georgia." "When I was a little girl in Columbus, there were things we could do and things we couldn't. One of the things we couldn't do was go into museums, let alone think of hanging our pictures there. My, times have changed. Just look at me now."

During her later years, arthritis in her hands made painting difficult. Alma Thomas bathed her hands in hot water and kept on painting. A friend remembers that Alma was determined right up to the end of her life.

"'Do you have any idea what it's like to be caged in a seventy-eight year-old body and to have the mind and energy of a twenty-five year-old? If I could only turn the clock back about sixty years, I'd show them.' Then there was a silence, then a defiant, 'I'll show them anyway.'"