Alma Thomas: The Wonder of Life

Alma Woodsey Thomas, born in 1891 in Columbus, Georgia, moved at 16 to Washington, D.C., where she found what she’d been denied in segregationist Georgia—the opportunity to freely pursue her education.

In high school, Thomas took her first art class and fell deeply in love with painting. Excelling across the disciplines of math, science and architecture, it was to the last of these that she felt professionally called. But in those days, a female architect was a contradiction in terms—the field’s first solitary pioneers were only just beginning to emerge. Thomas chose art, but chose it on her own terms, setting down a road of her own making—which she alone would pioneer. 

After finishing Miner Normal School (now the University of the District of Colombia), she worked with young children in Delaware before studying fine arts at Howard University.

Thomas taught art at Shaw Junior High School, the first junior high school established for African Americans students in D.C. In 1938, she also founded the city’s first public school art gallery. She explored watercolor painting and co-founded the Barnett-Aden Gallery, recognized as the first privately owned gallery founded by African Americans in the U.S. She also served as the vice president and became a key figure in the Washington Color School, an abstract art movement exploring light and color.

Through night and weekend classes at American University, Thomas refined her art into a vibrant fusion of cubism and abstract expressionism. She developed her own creative style using colorful patterns, which were inspired by the urban life of Washington, D.C. She also expressed the beauty of space exploration through works such as The Eclipse (1970) and Atmospheric Effects I and II (1971).