"The use of color in my paintings is of paramount importance to me. Through color I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man’s inhumanity to man.”

Known for her large-scale abstract paintings comprised of rhythmic marks of exuberant color, Alma Thomas was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1891. The daughter of teachers, Thomas grew up around the educated adults her parents often entertained, including Booker T. Washington. In 1907, the family moved to Washington, DC, and in 1921, she enrolled in Howard University, becoming the university’s first fine arts graduate in 1924. She then earned a master’s in art education from Columbia University Teachers College. Throughout the 1930s, Thomas continued to work in education and organize community art programs in her hometown of Washington, DC. In the 1950s, she embarked on a decade-long formal study of art at American University with painter Jacob Kainen. Departing from realism, Thomas loosened her brushwork, and by the end of the decade, she found her voice in abstraction, patterning geometric shapes in rich colors against solid backgrounds. She retired from teaching in 1960, having decided to devote her time exclusively to art. Two major solo exhibitions in 1972—Alma Thomas at the Whitney Museum and Alma W. Thomas: A Retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC—brought her further recognition, and that same year, the mayor of DC, Walter Washington, declared September 9 to be Alma Thomas Day. In celebration, local TV and radio stations aired programs about her life and work.

The monumental canvases Thomas created in the 1960s and 1970s were informed by the local abstract movement in Washington, D.C. known as the Washington Color School, which included Morris Louis, Sam Gilliam, and Kenneth Noland, but her interest in color experimentation aligned her more closely to Josef Albers, Johannes Itten, and Wassily Kandinsky. Inspired by nature, by recent discoveries in the sciences, and by her own observations of earthly and celestial phenomena, Thomas’s work was devoid of overt political content. Her dedication to abstraction reflected her belief that modern art at its best could transcend political and historical concerns. However, her preference for abstract, joyously expressionistic, gestural strokes of color was not accompanied by a retreat from historical and social realities. Although the level of Thomas’s success as an artist in the 1960s and 1970s meant that she could devote herself exclusively to painting, she never ceased to be a vital force in her community. In addition to her involvement with Artists for CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), Thomas continued to organize art programs and teach art classes to local youth. In 1975, Howard University honored her with its Alumni of Achievement Award in recognition of her importance to the history of art as well as to the local African American communities touched by her considerable talent as an artist and teacher.

In our featured work, Resurrection (1966), a perfectly square canvas (36” x 36”) can barely contain the radiance of a bright, luminous circle. At first glance, the painting appears to be a fairly straightforward reworking of the color wheel, where hues are arranged in inter-nesting bands instead of adjacent planes. Exploiting the full spectrum, Thomas uses her oils to create a jubilant mosaic of green, blue, violet, red, orange, and yellow; the work seems to systematically move from warm tones to cooler ones. However, within these circular fields of color are variations that betray the seeming simplicity of the composition and reveal the intricate dynamism of Thomas’s style. For example, the two rings of red comprise two separate shades. A hot, fiery red moves us from the warmth of orange to the cooler band of crimson adjacent to the violet. From violet, the painting takes us to a warm, purplish blue, reminiscent of irises. But this single band of color is not monochromatic; amid the deep shades of indigo are a few lighter ones, as if they were replacements for lost tesserae. Nor does Thomas’s composition move predictably from hot to cool. The final ring of square brushstrokes is green, more temperate than the blues around it. At the center of the work is a chartreuse disk, a warm circle that echoes the surrounding green, but also resurrects and transforms the outermost bands of yellow.

Just as Thomas’s use of bold, solid color belies the complexity of her composition, so too does the elementary shape of the circle. The smoothness of the circular form is disturbed by Thomas’s signature rectangular brushstrokes. Short, staccato, quadrangular bursts of color are arranged in a way that requires their altering at times—note the irregular triangles and trapezoids among the brushwork—further strengthening the impression that these brushstrokes are hard tiles whose shapes will not mold easily to the roundness of the design. Contained within in a square canvas, the entire painting becomes a play on geometric shapes: circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles all jostle for space and recognition within a vibrant loop that constantly brings our eye to the center of the canvas and back to the edges in an eternal cycle of visual rebirth and renewal signified by the title.