Alma Thomas

Alma Thomas’s vibrant color field paintings celebrate the beauty and exuberance of the natural world. The Washington Color School artist transformed trees, lakes, and sunsets into kaleidoscopic explosions of color. Her compositions can evoke Byzantine mosaics, George Seurat’s pointillism, and the chromatic experiments of Thomas's contemporaries Sam Gilliam and Morris Louis. Thomas was the first graduate of Howard University’s art department in 1924, but her career didn’t fully blossom until 1960, when she retired from a nearly 40-year career as a public school teacher in Washington, D.C. She went on to win acclaim for her bright abstractions, and in 1972, she was the first Black woman to receive a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work belongs in prominent collections around the United States (including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago) and has sold for millions on the secondary market.