Alma Thomas

Alma Woodsey Thomas was born on the twenty-second of September 1891 at Columbus, Georgia, eldest of the four daughters of John Harris Thomas, a businessman, and Amelia Cantey Thomas, a seamstress and dress designer. In 1907 the family left the South's violence for Washington, where Armstrong Technical High School schooled her, and in 1924 she became the first graduate of Howard University's new fine-arts program under James V. Herring — a bachelor of science in fine arts, followed by a master's in art education from Columbia Teachers College in 1934.

For thirty-five years, from 1924 to 1960, she taught art at Shaw Junior High School in Washington, founding the city's first public-school art gallery there in 1938, and studying nights and weekends at American University through the 1950s. The revolution came in retirement: in her seventies, arthritis in her hands, she found the style the world now knows — rhythmic daubs of pure color in stripes and circles, the Earth paintings of gardens seen from above, the Space paintings answering the moon shots of 1969.

In the spring of 1972, at eighty, she became the first Black woman given a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Corcoran Gallery followed with a retrospective that same year — Washington declared an Alma W. Thomas Day. She painted to the last: she died at Washington on the twenty-fourth of February 1978, at eighty-six, of complications following heart surgery.

The honors kept arriving after she was gone. In 2015 her Resurrection was unveiled in the White House's Old Family Dining Room — the first artwork by an African American woman in the White House Collection — and her paintings now hang in the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Honored be Alma Thomas, who taught children for thirty-five years and then taught color itself to sing.