5 minute read
American Beauty
The Life & Times Of Alma Thomas, Columbus, Georgia's Gift To The World
By Frank Etheridge
Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful toured major museums all across America for the past year before coming here, the artist’s hometown, for its grand finale.
A stunning display of the iconic abstract painter’s boundless appeal and timeless relevance, this exhibition of Thomas’ work — bolstered by a sideshow exploring the cultural context of her family’s deep roots in the community — will be on view at the Columbus Museum through Sept. 25.
Below is an excerpt from my interview with Jonathan Frederick Walz, Ph.D., Director of Curatorial Affairs & Curator of American Art at the Columbus Museum. Walz curated this sweeping retrospective and authored a book by the same title about the groundbreaking Columbus native.
What inspired the title of this exhibition, Everything Is Beautiful?
“We have at least two, reliable sources stating that her favorite song was Ray Stevens’ chart-topping pop hit “Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way).”
Beauty is a huge theme of the show. Her devotion to this pursuit of beauty took form in so many aspects of her life. Beauty, in the way she understood it, was something that she got up every morning and went and looked for and tried to create for herself and her community.”
When Alma moved with her family to Washington, D.C. as a teen, she reportedly went to her new school, saw her art classroom, and said it felt like “entering heaven.” What do you think she meant by that? And what does it tell us about Columbus at the time?
“One of the primary reasons the Thomas family left the area —which is a sad part of our city’s history, but it’s what happened — is that Black education at the time only went through ninth grade, while the white schools went through twelfth.
Her mother had a very strong family tradition about education. How important it was. How it works as a way to better yourself, and to better yourself so that you can bring the community along with you.
Thomas’s parents realized, “Education is how to open doors and get ahead in life, so we have to do better than just a ninth-grade education.”
Having grown up here, she played with the local clay as a kid. From that, she had a real sense that she really liked to make things, that it was really satisfying to her. So of course, this room at Armstrong Manual Training School in Washington is going to be heaven, because it’s full of all the materials and tools that she could ever want, there for her to use.
Imagine her seeing all of these desks and knowing that she wasn’t going to be alone but with other students as interested as she was in making things. So to her, it was paradise. I truly believe she walked into that classroom and felt like, ‘I belong here.’ ”
Even though she acknowledged challenges she faced as a black female artist, Thomas did not incorporate racial or feminist issues in her art, believing rather that the creative spirit transcends race and gender. What do you make of that?
“She comes of age as an artist in DC, when she’s operating under the late 19th and early 20th-century belief that African Americans are equal to other Americans. It’s about assimilating. Basically, it’s the melting pot idea.
She considered herself an American, period. No qualifier. She never denied that she was Black. But being an artist and being an American is how she described herself.
I think she was genuinely puzzled by the Black Power movement. But, at the same time, she had an experience with the Klan when she was a child here. So she knew the other side of the story, too. That the struggle for equality was ongoing.
She really embodies that early 20th-century belief that, through hard work and excelling at things like the arts and sciences, Blacks will overcome negative stereotypes and demonstrate that they’re equal to whites.
She felt like, ‘‘If we can overlook all of the ugliness and get to this place of transcendental beauty, then that’s what’s going to bring everybody together.”
Why do you think face masks emblazoned with Thomas’ art became popular during the pandemic?
“She becomes a symbolic figure once you start to learn about her and find out she was a school teacher for 35 years, that she led this exemplary life, and that she’s very determined to overcome all the obstacles in her way.
But, at the end of the day, if you don’t know any of that and you just go to a museum and you see one of her paintings on the wall there, you’re instantly attracted to them because they are so colorful.
Alma Thomas’ work is super approachable. It lends itself to wanting to share. If you look at the Alma Thomas hashtag on Instagram, somebody is
posting something about her or one of her paintings every single day. She just has that kind of appeal.”