Alma Thomas

by Ian Berry, Lauren Haynes, Bridget R. Cooks (Contributor)

This comprehensive monograph examines the work of Alma Thomas, an important artist in the Color Field movement and a pioneer among African-American artists working in abstraction. Alma Thomas started her painting career at the age of 68, after retiring from teaching art to junior high school students in Washington, DC. At the age of 80, Thomas’s exuberantly colored abstractions were exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where she was the first black female artist to be given a solo show. Filled with vibrant illustrations, this stunning volume traces Thomas’s development as an her transition from figuration to abstraction, her fascination with the natural world and space exploration, and the mesmerizing mosaic-like paintings she completed before her death. New writings focus on different themes in Thomas’s work, and the book includes specially commissioned responses by leading artists Leslie Hewitt, Jennie C. Jones, Leslie Wayne, and Saya Woolfalk. Together these bring Thomas’s work to a new generation of readers. As the work of many African-American abstractionists is only recently coming into the spotlight, this important book on Alma Thomas profiles a truly pioneering figure.

Genres: Art

256 pages, Hardcover

Published December 22, 2016

Reviews

[Jonathan Frederick Walz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is disappointing for all the reasons I already suspected it might be: primarily that the editors squandered a major opportunity to complete new in-depth research and thoughtful analyses on the oeuvre of an artist whose last full-blown museum retrospective was held in 1998. This publication appears as an afterthought, especially given the tome's appearance at least three months after the exhibition tour closed (and that despite the organizer's attempted spin to convince readers that the book felicitously extends the physical exhibition. Really?). Thomas is ripe for reconsideration and I had high hopes for the essays by Nikki Greene and Lauren Hayes, but they are short, celebratory, and on the shallow side (dammit!). The editors tried diligently to "beef up" this volume with visual responses by contemporary artists (ok), little known photographs of the artist (great), and a section of reprinted texts by/about Thomas, dated 1972 to 2016. The best of these latter are Jonathan Binstock's excellent 1998 essay (from the Fort Wayne exhibition catalogue) and Richard Kalina's solid (and lengthy) review of the present project for Art in America (2016). While I see the logic that "it would have been a shame" not to document the 2016 show, in the end this book just makes that much more apparent the need for good, critical-analytical thought about Thomas, her life, and her work. Watch this space! #TCM2020

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alma Thomas is one of my all-time favorite artists; I was introduced to her at the 2016 exhibit at the Studio Museum, which produced this book. The reproductions here are very satisfying. The essays were disappointingly shallow and repetitive, and what I really wanted was an index of the art so that I could flip back and forth every time a piece was mentioned. The archive of articles and interviews was wonderful, particularly Jonathan Binstock’s essay, which puts Thomas in context of art history and contemporary artists.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love her art and her quotes within the story! p. 60 "Why the tree! The holly tree! I looked at the tree in the window, and that became my inspiration."

And, paintings about 'the splash down' from Apollo 12.