Alma Thomas (1891-1978) received a rich cultural upbringing from her parents, a businessman and a dress designer. She demonstrated creativity at an early age, making clay sculptures and other artworks. When Thomas was a teenager, her family moved to Washington, D.C. because of the limited opportunities in their town in Georgia.
Alma thrived in her high school math and architectural drawing courses. She then enrolled in the newly founded art department at Howard University and became the first student to graduate with a Fine Arts degree from the school. Thomas later earned an MFA from Columbia University’s Teacher’s College and taught art until 1960, when she retired to focus on her own art.
Ten years before her retirement, Thomas returned to Washington, to American University, to study art. She embraced the new, bold shapes and colors that were emerging in Color Field painting. Artists such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Morris Louis filled their canvases with large “color fields,” or areas of rich color. Color Field painters focused on color as a form of transcendent aesthetic expression. For them, color was independent of traditional form.
Thomas embraced their abstract focus on pure color and sought nature as a source of inspiration, often looking to her garden. “Little dabs of color that spread out very free . . . that’s how it all began,” she explained. “And every morning since then, the wind has given me new colors through the windowpanes.”
For her 1970 work The Eclipse, Thomas painted the moon in front of the sun in a moment of total eclipse. Brilliant, saturated colors radiate from behind the moon, which is the focal point. Despite this, the moon is off-center in the composition, giving the work a powerful sense of movement. This is enhanced by the busy pattern of color blocks on a solid background. The varied edges of each block fit together, nearly covering the surface. The blocks create an internal rhythm in the work. Like other Color Field paintings, The Eclipse is a very large-scale work, enveloping the viewer’s field of vision with pulsing hues.
In 1972, Thomas became the first African-American woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art.