oil and acrylic on canvas
65 x 89 inches, 165.1 x 226.1 cm
Greenpoint Avenue Bridge, 2007
oil and acrylic on canvas
60 x 78 inches, 152.4 x 198.1 cm
Newtown, 2007
oil and acrylic on canvas
65 x 86 inches, 165.1 x 218.4 cm
"Alma Thomas (1891-1978)
A prominent abstract painter of the 1960s and 1970s, Alma Thomas was the first African American woman to have a solo art exhibition
Alma Thomas |
Born in Columbus on September 22, 1891, Alma Woodsey Thomas was the eldest daughter of John Harris Thomas, a successful businessman, and Amelia Cantey, a dress designer. Alma Thomas showed artistic tendencies as a child when she used local clays to make homemade puppets and sculptures. Her home life was a constant changing environment of cultural activities, as her parents arranged for various lecturers and speakers to make presentations there.
Despite this rich atmosphere of culture, the prevalent social ills of racism and a poor education system for African Americans caused the Thomas family to worry about the future of their family in Georgia. In 1907 the Thomas family moved to Washington, D.C., where they settled in a house that Alma would occupy for the next seventy-one years and that remains in the Thomas family to this day.
In high school Thomas excelled at math and architectural drawing. After graduation she enrolled
Air View of a Spring Nursery, 1966 |
After a long and distinguished career as a teacher, Thomas retired in 1960 to focus her energies entirely on her own art. During her professional career she had remained active and visible in Washington's growing art community, and in the late 1950s she developed the confidence and knowledge to pursue the highly colored abstract style for which she is known. Her close relationships with fellow artists Gene Davis, Jacob Kainen, and Morris Louis of the
Untitled (Music Series), 1978 |
Thomas died in Washington, D.C., in 1978 at the age of eighty-six. Three years later a posthumous retrospective exhibition was held at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art. In 1998 the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana organized a retrospective exhibition of her paintings that traveled to Columbus. Today her work can be found in many major museums.
The Columbus Museum holds an important collection of Thomas's paintings, watercolors, sculptures, and marionettes, as well as a significant archive of her papers. The Smithsonian American Art Museum also has an archive of her paintings and family papers. "
Suggested Reading
Merry A. Foresta, A Life in Art: Alma Thomas, 1891-1978 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981).
Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Alma W. Thomas: A Retrospective of the Paintings (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 1998).
Nicholas Krushenick (May 31, 1929 – February 5, 1999) was one of the forerunners of the pop art movement. Krushenick began showing his work publicly in New York in 1957, at the age of 28. By 1962, his work was shown at upscale galleries and, by the year 2000, was part of major permanent collections throughout New York and the United States Born in New York City in 1929, Krushenick served in World War II, then studied art upon his return to home life. He attended the Art Students League of New York (1948–1950) and the Hans Hofmann School Of Art (1950-1951). He and brother John Krushenick opened an artists' cooperative called the Brata Gallery in the late fifties. In 1969, Krushenick gave up his soft brush abstract expressionist technique for bolder colours and lines similar to illustration, yet maintaining use of abstract figurative forms. This style marked him as one of the original practitioners of pop art. In his later years, Krushenick taught at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1977 to 1991. He died in New York on February 5, 1999, at age 69. | ||
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