Homecoming: Artist-Educator Alma W. Thomas Returns to Columbus in Style
“Alma would look out of the window at the trains going south and how fast they were moving. We were on a slow train to Washington. It was a local. It seemed to stop at every little cowshed on the way. Alma would say,‘Oh, when I go back, I’ m going to ride on one of those fast trains, not one like this.’ ” – John Maurice Thomas, 1986
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olumbus-born Alma W. Thomas (1891–1978) lived in Washington, DC, for much of her life, but she did return to the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley on occasion. From her experience of growing up on the Georgia-Alabama border, she retained fond memories that eventually “found expression” in her later acrylic paintings (fig. 1). More than 100 years after the Cantey-Thomas family’s move northward, the artist-educator returns in style to Columbus with the exhibition Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful. In late 2016, Director Marianne Richter observed that, while The Columbus Museum had previously hosted other Alma Thomas retrospectives (in 1982 and in 1999–2000), the institution itself had never organized a multi-venue traveling show about her. The artist-educator’s hometown museum, with its unique perspective based in American art and regional history, had never told a national audience its own version of this appealing and important story. This prompting, especially within the context of the deep but little-known hold-
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