The Multidimensional Creativity of Alma W. Thomas

Major Exhibition and Catalogue Arrive at the Columbus Museum

Renowned artist Alma W. Thomas’ (1891-1978) artistic journey took her from Columbus, Georgia, to international acclaim. The traveling exhibition Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful offers a comprehensive overview of her extraordinary career with more than 150 objects, including late-career paintings that have never before been exhibited or published. The exhibition debuted at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, and visited The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee before it closes at The Columbus Museum in Columbus, Georgia, July 1-Sept. 25, 2022. The exhibition is co-organized by the Chrysler Museum of Art and The Columbus Museum. The exhibition is co-curated by Jonathan Frederick Walz, Ph.D., Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of American Art at The Columbus Museum, and Seth Feman, Ph.D., the Chrysler’s former Deputy Director for Art and Interpretation and Curator of Photography.

Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful will demonstrate how Thomas’ artistic practices extended to every facet of her life, from community service and teaching to gardening and dress. Unlike a traditional retrospective, the exhibition is organized around multiple themes from Thomas’ life and career. These themes include the context of her Washington Color School cohort, the creative communities connected to her time at Howard University, and the protests against museums that failed to represent women and artists of color.

This exhibition, as well as its published catalogue, includes a wide range of artworks and archival materials that reveal Thomas’ complex and deliberate artistic existence before, during and after the years of her mature output and career-making solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972. She was the first African American woman to have a solo show at the famed New York institution.

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Whitney show to Thomas’ career,” said Feman, now Executive Director and CEO of the Frist Art Museum. “Yet the Whitney show wasn’t the be-all, end-all it is often made out to be. Thomas worked persistently to establish a successful artistic career in the decades leading up to

the Whitney show, and she opened several new creative pathways in the years after. This exhibition looks at the long span of her creativity so as to celebrate a full lifetime of accomplishments.”

Alma Thomas’ Resurrection was added to the White House Collection in 2015. One year later, her work was on view in a two-venue exhibition at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum Art Gallery at Skidmore College and The Studio Museum in Harlem. In recent years, her works have been acquired by notable public institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful aims to supplement this recent attention, ensuring new discoveries even for those familiar with Thomas’ creativity.

Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful’s showing in Columbus, Georgia will be particularly special. Sand Unshaken: The Origin Story of Alma Thomas, a concurrent historical exhibition will be on view. The Columbus Museum’s Curator of History and Exhibitions Manager, Rebecca Bush, designed the project as a complement to the landmark art exhibition and in tandem with her contributions to its catalogue. Sand Unshaken seeks to challenge traditional myths about Thomas’ upbringing while spotlighting the achievements and challenges of an African American family in the New South, drawing on The Columbus Museum’s rich Thomas family archives of photographs, documents, and threedimensional artifacts, including furniture from Thomas’ Columbus home.

“Thomas is best known for the large canvases she produced during the decade of 1966-1976, and several posthumous exhibitions have focused on this body of work,” Walz said. “Everything Is Beautiful presents visitors with little known early- and mid-career work as well as several late canvases that have never before been exhibited or published. We anticipate that this material will be a revelation to scholars and the general public alike. The number of discoveries made during the exhibition’s research and development phase is truly remarkable.”

Taking cues from Thomas’ wide-ranging interests and her broad network of collaborators and supporters, the co-curators developed a scholarly approach that resonated with the artist’s own disregard for pigeonholes and subjective limitations. They assembled an advisory committee of more than 20 interdisciplinary scholars of diverse backgrounds and experiences and convened a two-day gathering at the University of Maryland Center for Art and Knowledge at The Phillips Collection in January 2020. Scholars included specialists in the history of gardening, fashion, African American religious practices, race and racial identity, women and gender studies, abstract art, and art conservation. The discussions during the study days, along with the conversations that have continued since, highlighted several underexamined facets of Thomas’ creativity: her relationship to the domestic and urban environments in which she lived; the expression of her intersectional identity through stage work and self-fashioning; her use of art as a form of educational and community activism; her ecocritical grasp of nature’s importance amid urbanization; and her remarkable studio practice, in which she worked through series and adapted to physical and technical challenges to open new creative pathways.

“In exploring how Thomas generated and nurtured her creativity, we begin to understand how Thomas employed it to transform her world,” says Feman. “Thomas’ quest for beauty had as much to do with art as it did with supporting her neighborhood and the wider community. We believe that the lessons she taught in her day might be a model for shaping public life today.”

“The seeming incongruity between the exhibition’s title and our current social crises is not lost on us,” Walz stated. “During 2020, when we were finalizing exhibition plans and catalogue content, the world experienced a global pandemic, stark economic disparity, eroded trust in democracy, intensified violence, and confrontations over the disproportionate incarceration and killing of Black and Brown people. Beauty often seemed hard to find. This backdrop of global events confirmed for us the relevance of Thomas and her creative pursuits to the contemporary moment.”

In addition to more than 150 objects, Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful includes an array of interpretive material to make the show accessible and relatable. Labels and text panels weave together Thomas’ diverse creative interests, and a family-friendly interactive explores how to live a creative life today.

Visitors to The Columbus Museum will have the opportunity to enjoy a variety of education programs throughout the run of the exhibition. Youth and family visitors will be able to enjoy guided tours, art making activities, and themed summer camps. Public programs include a puppet making workshop and a closing celebration on September 22, marking Thomas’ 131st birthday.

The full-color, 336-page hardcover catalogue published by the organizing institutions and distributed by Yale University Press features a large collection of new scholarship by multiple contributors, incorporating an array of perspectives on Thomas’ life and art. Longform essays include Africana scholar Tiffany E. Barber on Thomas and performance and self-fashioning; historian Rebecca Bush on Thomas’ upbringing and family history in Jim-Crow-era Georgia; art historian Aruna D’Souza on Thomas’ significant place in the controversies surrounding the display of African American art in the 1960s and 1970s; curator Jonathan F. Walz on the importance of motion to Thomas’ art; and a team of conservators from the Smithsonian on the way Thomas resourcefully modified her materials and artistic processes to adapt to, and even incorporate, aging and impairment. Shorter essays by 11 interdisciplinary scholars will emphasize how close looking from diverse vantage points can reveal surprising and illuminating interpretations. These include an exploration of Thomas’ classroom activities, her church life, perception of her age and gender, the cultivation of her garden, the context of environmentalism, the international display of her work and more. Essayists include Seth Feman, Jacqueline Francis, Kimberli Gant, Grey Gundaker, Michael D. Harris, Melanee C. Harvey, Amy M. Mooney, James Nisbet, Nell Irvin Painter and Rebecca VanDiver. The eclectic approach to the catalogue follows from Thomas’ own disregard for silos, borders and other arbitrary boundaries, echoing the artist’s insistence on collaboration and interdisciplinarity. Together, these insights add dimension and complexity to our understanding of Thomas and her world. The catalogue is available for purchase from The Columbus Museum.