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Primary: After and With Alma Thomas
An exploration of sisterhood, creativity, and community inspired by the artist Alma Thomas’s life and work, from the award-winning poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Alma Thomas (1891–1978) was an influential figure in twentieth-century modern art, best known for her bright, mosaiclike abstract paintings. Although some critics have seen Thomas’s emphasis on beauty, color, and abstract art as a way to divorce her work from her life as a Black woman, Alexis Pauline Gumbs reveals how Thomas’s art was, in fact, deeply rooted in the Black community in which she lived. Black, in other words, was one of Thomas’s primary colors.
Gumbs sheds light on Thomas’s experience as a junior high school teacher in the still-segregated schools of Washington, D.C., where Thomas—as educator, mentor, and advocate—established community art programs for Black schoolchildren and galleries to showcase Black artists’ work. In this volume of poems and prose, Gumbs becomes a student of Thomas, allowing the wonder in Thomas’s work to open her to wonder about her own creativity, sistering, daughtering, and practice of communal transformation.
Alma Thomas (1891–1978) was an influential figure in twentieth-century modern art, best known for her bright, mosaiclike abstract paintings. Although some critics have seen Thomas’s emphasis on beauty, color, and abstract art as a way to divorce her work from her life as a Black woman, Alexis Pauline Gumbs reveals how Thomas’s art was, in fact, deeply rooted in the Black community in which she lived. Black, in other words, was one of Thomas’s primary colors.
Gumbs sheds light on Thomas’s experience as a junior high school teacher in the still-segregated schools of Washington, D.C., where Thomas—as educator, mentor, and advocate—established community art programs for Black schoolchildren and galleries to showcase Black artists’ work. In this volume of poems and prose, Gumbs becomes a student of Thomas, allowing the wonder in Thomas’s work to open her to wonder about her own creativity, sistering, daughtering, and practice of communal transformation.
176 pages, Hardcover
Published September 29, 2026
About the author
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
35 books601 followersAlexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity and coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines and the Founder and Director of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, an educational program based in Durham, North Carolina.
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Review of advance copy
Primary: After and With Alma Thomas offers a distinctive literary and artistic engagement with the life and work of Alma Thomas, using poetry and prose to explore creativity, community, sisterhood, and the possibilities of artistic practice. Alexis Pauline Gumbs approaches Thomas not simply as an influential modernist painter, but as an artist whose creative life was deeply connected to Black community and collective transformation.
The book brings attention to Thomas's work as an artist, educator, mentor, and advocate. Her experience teaching in segregated Washington, D.C., and her efforts to create art programs for Black schoolchildren and spaces for Black artists add important social and communal dimensions to discussions of her abstract art.
One of the book's most compelling elements is the relationship Gumbs develops between Thomas's creativity and her own artistic and intellectual practice. Through poems and prose, Gumbs becomes a student of Thomas, reflecting on creativity, daughtering, sistering, memory, and the ways artistic relationships can open new possibilities for communal life.
The book has strong relevance across contemporary art, African American studies, Black feminist thought, poetry, cultural criticism, art history, and creative practice. Its combination of literary writing and critical engagement also makes it particularly interesting for readers exploring the connections between visual art, identity, community, education, and social transformation.
The Goodreads listing currently shows 0 ratings and 0 written reviews, while the book is forthcoming on September 29, 2026. This creates an important opportunity to establish reader awareness before publication and introduce Primary to audiences interested in Alma Thomas, Black art, poetry, feminist scholarship, and contemporary cultural criticism.
The book brings attention to Thomas's work as an artist, educator, mentor, and advocate. Her experience teaching in segregated Washington, D.C., and her efforts to create art programs for Black schoolchildren and spaces for Black artists add important social and communal dimensions to discussions of her abstract art.
One of the book's most compelling elements is the relationship Gumbs develops between Thomas's creativity and her own artistic and intellectual practice. Through poems and prose, Gumbs becomes a student of Thomas, reflecting on creativity, daughtering, sistering, memory, and the ways artistic relationships can open new possibilities for communal life.
The book has strong relevance across contemporary art, African American studies, Black feminist thought, poetry, cultural criticism, art history, and creative practice. Its combination of literary writing and critical engagement also makes it particularly interesting for readers exploring the connections between visual art, identity, community, education, and social transformation.
The Goodreads listing currently shows 0 ratings and 0 written reviews, while the book is forthcoming on September 29, 2026. This creates an important opportunity to establish reader awareness before publication and introduce Primary to audiences interested in Alma Thomas, Black art, poetry, feminist scholarship, and contemporary cultural criticism.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review