Letter from the Director

This summer, we are thrilled to bring Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful to Columbus, Alma Thomas’s hometown. The largest and most comprehensive exhibition organized to date about Thomas, Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful is the first major exhibition about the artist that the Museum has organized.

Key objects in the exhibition are the paintings, drawings, watercolors, marionettes, and historical material that Thomas’s younger sister, John Maurice Thomas, generously donated to the Museum in 1994, and the 1966 painting, Air View of a Spring Nursery, which the Museum acquired in 1979 through a combined gift of the National Association of Negro Business Women, the artist, and a Museum purchase. Air View of a Spring Nursery was the first painting that Thomas created in her iconic abstract style, and it was displayed in 1972 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the artist’s groundbreaking, one-person exhibition.

As the title of the exhibition implies, Alma Thomas sought and created beauty in the world around her and in the work she made, the latter encompassing far more than her paintings, drawings, and sculpture. As the exhibition has traveled to its other venues (the Chrysler Museum of Art, The Phillips Collection, and the Frist Art Museum), visitors have been very positive about this important aspect of the artist’s practice, commenting that they have found her work and life to be uplifting and inspirational. As Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful has its homecoming in Columbus, I hope that you, too, will find beauty in Thomas’s life and work and like her, will be inspired to seek it in the world around you.

For an endeavor of this scope, we could not have asked for a better partner in organizing the exhibition than the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. Co-curators Jonathan Frederick Walz and Seth Feman spent the better part of four years organizing the exhibition and its complementary catalogue. We are grateful to have received generous corporate support from Aflac, the exhibition’s presenting sponsor, and major grants from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. We are anxious to celebrate the opening of Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful with you! Please join us for the special members’ preview of the exhibition on June 30.

Summer is a wonderful time to visit the Museum, not only Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful and the concurrent complementary exhibition, Sand Unshaken: The Origin Story of Alma Thomas, but to revisit our permanent collection and enjoy our family-friendly programs, including summer camps. I hope to see you many times at the Museum this summer!