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

Columbus-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-ings of Thomas-related materials at the Museum, caused a burst of investigatory research. The Museum’s increasing desire to share with a wider public the legacy preserved by the artist’s sister John Maurice Thomas and great-nephew Charles Thomas Lewis added further incentive. Indeed, these materials confirmed for co-curators Jonathan Frederick Walz, Director of Curatorial Affairs & Curator of American Art at The Columbus Museum, and Seth Feman, former Deputy Director for Art & Interpretation and Curator of Photography at the Chrysler Museum of Art, that Thomas’s pursuit of beauty extended from her youth in Columbus and matriculation at Howard University to her successes in New York and twilight years in the nation’s capital.

Everything Is Beautiful presents five archetypal spaces of creativity for Thomas. The Studio traces the artist’s development from realistic still lifes to more geometricized objects and figures to a coherent group of abstract expressionist compositions. It also illustrates how Thomas arrived at her final compositions on canvas through an iterative strategy of multiple preliminary sketches on paper (fig. 2). The Garden speaks to the importance of “cultivation” for Thomas: literally, in the parks and gardens throughout Washington and how they inspired her, but also metaphorically, in the many students, friends, and ideas she nurtured over decades, often in her own backyard. Surveying Thomas’s lifelong passion for the theater, The Stage spotlights her little-known dramatic productions (fig. 3), and her self-conscious “staging” of her public persona, as a woman, an African American, and an artist. Two dresses, recreated from historical photographs by Howard University professor Elka Stevens, amplify Thomas’s fashion sense and how it permeated her painting practices. The Public Sphere encompasses Thomas’s work in the wider world, including the innovative thinking and indefatigable energy she brought to formal classroom teaching at Shaw Junior High School. In addition, the section explores Thomas’s religious practice and community service centered in St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and the impact she had on students who successfully followed their own creative interests. The Whitney reprises Thomas’s groundbreaking 1972 exhibition in Manhattan, which catapulted her to fame; it also uncovers the tumultuous social context that brought the artist-educator to the attention of the wider world. In The Field, Thomas appears at the nexus of several overlapping social spheres: Howard University, The Phillips Collection, the Barnett Aden Gallery, and the American University. Several of Thomas’s post-retirement canvases alongside paintings by peers demonstrate how Thomas was not a passive observer or mindless follower but an active participant in the aesthetic debates that engaged the art scene in the nation’s capital, including the Washington Color School, during the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. Triumphantly, the exhibition ends on a high note: the monumental triptych Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music (fig. 4), Thomas’s enduring masterpiece joyously touches upon so many themes of the artist’s life and career, themes that also thread throughout the exhibition: aesthetics, gardening, music, performance, community, nature, and self-actualization.

“Everything Is Beautiful,” co-curator Feman notes, “blends Thomas’s bold abstract canvases from the 1960s and ‘70s with ephemera, photographs, sculpture, and works by other artists to evoke a sense of the world in which Thomas developed and pursued her belief that focusing on beauty can change the world.” In assembling the exhibition, the curators especially sought to uncover little known and rarely exhibited works, ensuring new discoveries for even those familiar with Thomas’s creativity (fig. 5). Everything Is Beautiful and the companion show Sand Unshaken: The Origin Story of Alma Thomas, organized by Curator of History Rebecca Bush, will clearly convey to visitors that, while Alma Thomas may have left Columbus as a teenager, the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley nevertheless held a longlasting and influential hold over her later life and work.

Purchase the Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful exhibition catalog from the Museum’s gift shop today!

This extraordinary 336-page publication offers a sweeping reassessment of the artist/educator that transforms our understanding of her diverse forms of creativity while also revealing how a persistent search for beauty can address pressing social concerns. The catalogue includes varied artworks and archival materials that span the artist’s long life, over 150 full-color plates and 100 additional color images, newly commissioned research on newly available materials by diverse scholars, a poem by National Book Critics Circle Award-winning writer Ross Gay, and much more! It has been featured in “best art book”lists by publications such as ARTnews, Art in America, My Modern Net, Third Coast Review, and the Los Angeles Times.

Images:

Fig. 1: Alma W. Thomas, Babbling Brook and Whistling Poplar Trees Symphony, 1976, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 52 in., Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York

Fig. 2: Ida Jervis, Alma Thomas in her studio (detail), 1968 , gelatin silver print, The Columbus Museum, Gift of Miss John Maurice Thomas in memory of her parents John H. and Amelia W. Cantey Thomas and her sister Alma Woodsey Thomas, The Columbus Museum G.1994.20.172.9

Fig. 3: Unknown photographer, Alma Thomas’s students performing Alice in Wonderland, c. 1934, black and white photograph in paper mount, Alma W. Thomas Papers, The Columbus Museum

Fig. 4 : Alma W. Thomas, Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music, 1976, acrylic on three canvases, Smithsonian American Art Museum, bequest of the artist (1980.36.2.A–C)

Fig. 5: Alma W. Thomas, Untitled (mobile), c. 1963, painted metal and wire, Collection of Charles Thomas Lewis