Alma Woodsey Thomas
Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891 - 1978) was active/lived in District Of Columbia. Alma Thomas is known for Non objective-optical imagery painting, teaching.

Medium: Watercolor on paper
Size: 16" x 11"
Frame Size: 22" x 17"
Condition: Great, No Blemishes
Style: Abstract
Circa: 1963 Dated

Associated with the Washington, DC Color Field Painters of the 1970s, Alma Woodsey Thomas became the first black woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The success of the show took the art world by surprise.

Born in Columbus, Georgia, she had a happy childhood with summers spent on her grandfather's plantation in Fort Mitchell, Alabama where she loved the beautiful landscape, abundant wildflowers and exotic animals, including peacocks. There she began her first experiments as an artist, molding objects from riverbank clay.

Alma Thomas moved to Washington, DC with her family in 1907 when she was fifteen and lived the remainder of her life there except for six years she taught in Wilmington, Delaware and three years she spend in New York City in the early 1930s. She attended Armstrong High School and fell in love with the art room. She took a teaching degree from Howard University, where in 1924, she became the first graduate of its Fine Art Department. She then earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University Teachers College, and from 1925 to 1960, had an art-teaching career in the Washington, DC public schools, beginning at Shaw Junior High School.

During these years, she was an active artist herself and a major force in the Washington arts scene, organizing clubs and art lectures for her students, establishing art galleries in the public schools, and in 1943, co-founding the Barnett-Aden Gallery, one of the first commercial modern art galleries in the area.

Her early canvases were realistic, but by 1959, her canvases were totally non-representational, and by 1964, after her retirement, she was constructing images almost totally from dabs of paint, creating a tight net of color effect. These works were the breakthrough in her career, and Howard University had a retrospective of her work and in 1972, the Whitney Museum had an important exhibition of her painting which had significant positive impact on her reputation.

Much of her inspiration came from the patches of colors she found looking through her window.

PROVENANCE
Private Collection from New York

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