Kelly Quinn Education Director at the American Museum of Art at the Smithsonian
Kelly Quinn, Terra Foundation Project Manager for Online Scholarly and Educational Initiatives, looks at painter Alma Thomas' taste for brainchild in her piece of work and dress.
Upon learning that the late Alma Thomas's birthday was approaching, I began to poke around on our website and in our collections to acquire a little more than about her life. I accept been drawn to the details of her biography largely because I am a social historian interested in African American life and thought. And, as an fine art historian interested in abstraction and Washington's Color School, I take been drawn to her paintings. While I knew her life story and her artwork, information technology was when I turned to the Archives of American Art's Image Gallery that I first saw her as a person. Looking at pictures of Alma Thomas got me thinking virtually the aesthetic choices artists make, and I discovered a new fascination with her sartorial choices.
The Alma Thomas papers capture my fancy because of my long-standing interest in this African American female person teacher and painter who lived and worked for much of her life in Washington, D.C. until her death in 1978. When she was a teenager, Thomas'southward family moved north from Georgia to Washington, D.C. during the Bully Migration. The Commune of Columbia served as a cultural, political, social, and economical upper-case letter for African American men, women, and children at the turn of the twentieth century.
An alumna of the D.C. Public Schools (and other prestigious colleges and universities), Alma Thomas served as a instructor at Shaw Junior High School between 1924 and 1960. Thomas introduced generations of children to fine art and art appreciation through her distinctive pedagogy which included establishing the school system'southward first art gallery, organizing annual exhibitions of African American artists during Negro History Week, and developing the School Arts League Project. During her tenure—both as a student and as a faculty member—the D.C. Public Schools was ane of the premier primary and secondary educational institutions for African Americans in the canton.
Ida Jervis's photographic portraits of Alma Thomas from 1968 allow us to peek into Thomas's studio and glimpse her practice. In a favorite of mine, Thomas stands at a tabular array, paintbrush in hand, tracing curvilinear shapes, working with an abstruse painting. Those lines repeat the leaves in the potted plant that stands in the brilliant window to her left. This sheet of intersecting arcs and overlapping shapes is markedly dissimilar from the rigid rows of bright colour we often acquaintance with Thomas'south work. Those (perhaps) more familiar paintings announced in other shots. Indeed, Thomas posed for Jervis in forepart of several sheets of "Alma's Stripes" equally she called them. These portraits nudged me to consider Alma Thomas's physical presence too.
On this day in 1968, Thomas favored gridded patterns on her canvases and in her costume. Her dress is composed of a series of checkerboards and colored squares. At the opening of her solo bear witness at the Whitney Museum in 1972—when she was seventy-vii years former—Thomas sported a different dress (or maybe a squeegee) with a bold geometric print featuring diamonds, squares, and zigzags. I began to wonder, "Why did she choose these detail items on these occasions?" Did she aim to associate her concrete cocky so closely to her paintings? Was this a witting attempt to coordinate and link the artistic practices of painting and dressing? Thomas studied costume pattern while a student at Howard University, and her mother executed her designs for school productions. I chatted nigh Thomas's way sense with my co-worker Elizabeth Botten who mused about whether and how Thomas sought out the fabric: did she pick information technology out and design the pieces or did she purchase them? Nosotros are left with more questions than answers but i thing is certain: I am at present inspired to don a checkerboard caftan on September 22 to mark Alma Woodsey Thomas's birthday.
Happy Altogether, Ms. Thomas!
Kelly Quinn is the Terra Foundation Project Director for Online Scholarly and Educational Initiatives at the Archives of American Fine art.
Source: https://www.aaa.si.edu/blog/2012/09/alma%E2%80%99s-stripes-finding-fashion-the-alma-thomas-papers
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