Alma Woodsey Thomas (September 22, 1891 – February 24, 1978) was an African-American artist and teacher who lived and worked in Washington, D.C., and is now recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century. Thomas is best known for the "exuberant", colorful, abstract paintings that she created after her retirement from a 35-year career teaching art at Washington's Shaw Junior High School.
Thomas, who is often considered a member of the Washington Color School art movement but alternatively classified by some as an Expressionist, earned her teaching degree from University of the District of Columbia (known as Miner Normal School at the time). She was the first graduate of Howard University's art department, and maintained connections to that university through her life. She achieved success as an African-American female artist despite the segregation and prejudice of her time.
Thomas's reputation has continued to grow since her death. Her paintings are displayed in notable museums and collections, and they have been the subject of several books and solo museum exhibitions. In 2021, a museum sold Thomas's painting Alma's Flower Garden in a private transaction for $2.8 million.
Life and work
Childhood, education, and early teaching positions
Alma Thomas was born on September 22, 1891, in Columbus, Georgia, as the oldest of four daughters, to John Harris Thomas, a businessman, and Amelia Cantey Thomas, a dress designer. Her mother and aunts, she later wrote, were teachers and Tuskegee Institute graduates. She was creative as a child, although her serious artistic career began much later in life. While growing up, Thomas displayed her artistic capabilities, and enjoyed making small pieces of artwork such as puppets, sculptures, and plates, mainly out of clay from the river behind her childhood home. Despite a growing interest in the arts, Thomas was "not allowed" to go into art museums as a child. She was provided with music lessons, as her mother played the violin.
In 1907, when Thomas was 16, the family moved to the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., to escape racial violence in Georgia and to seek the benefits of the public school system of Washington. Her parents made this move despite that the family "kind of came down a bit," socially and economically, in leaving their upper-middle class life in Georgia. Describing the reason for the family move, she later wrote, "When I finished grade school in Columbus, there was nowhere that I could continue my education, so my parents decided to move the family to Washington." Other writers have pointed to the Atlanta race riots and racial massacre of 1906 as among the reasons her family left Georgia. As another example of the racial violence that her family faced in Georgia, Alma's father had an encounter with a lynch mob shortly before Alma was born, and her family attributed her poor hearing to the fright from that incident. Although still segregated, the nation's capital was known to offer more opportunities for African-Americans than most other cities. As she wrote in the 1970s, "At least Washington's libraries were open to Negroes, whereas Columbus excluded Negroes from its only library." In Washington, Thomas attended Armstrong Technical High School, where she took her first art classes. About them, she said "When I entered the art room, it was like entering heaven. . . . The Armstrong High School laid the foundation for my life." In high school, she excelled at math and science, and architecture specifically interested her. A miniature schoolhouse that she made from cardboard using techniques learned in her architecture studies at Armstrong was exhibited at the Smithsonian in 1912. Although she expressed an interest in becoming an architect, it was unusual for women to work in this profession and this limited her prospects.
After graduating from high school in 1911, she studied kindergarten education at Miner Normal School (now known as University of the District of Columbia), earning her teaching credentials in 1913. In 1914, she obtained a teaching position in the Princess Anne schools on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where she taught for four months. In 1915, she started teaching kindergarten at the Thomas Garrett Settlement House in Wilmington, Delaware, staying there until 1921.