Alma Thomas

Alma Thomas (1891-1978) was a woman of firsts. She was the first graduate of the Fine Art Department at Howard University, the first African American to receive a Master of Arts degree in art education from Columbia University, in 1934, and, in 1972, the first African American woman honored with a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Her mature style emerged late and arrived fully formed. Introduced in the 1950s to Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, and the circle of artists who would become known as the Washington Color Field group, Thomas began composing in pure, exuberant color. The paintings that followed distilled decades of preparation: sustained study of color theory at American University, alongside earlier work in watercolor, costume and marionette design, and abstraction. They are marked by strong design, a large-scale format, and unmodulated color deployed in rhythmic, mosaic-like passages. Her touch remained gestural throughout, and she frequently allowed pencil lines to register beneath and between the active brushstrokes, leaving the structure of the work visible within its shimmer.

Thomas supported herself by teaching and by working at two institutions central to Washington's Black artistic life. She helped establish the Barnett Aden Gallery, the first such establishment to exhibit modern American art, and one that introduced then-unknown Black artists to the public. She was also associated with The Little Paris Studio.

Recognition came in Thomas's eighties, but the achievement was decades in the making: a body of work in which color operates as pure, sustained sensation.