In this segment, we celebrate Washington-based artist Alma Thomas.

Her works are on view in major museums nationwide, but in D.C., she was also a beloved teacher and groundbreaking artist who overcame racial division and the subordinate role assigned to women artists in the early 20th century to reach national acclaim.

In 2015, the White House unveiled renovations to an area known as the Old Family Dining Room.

It featured the White House collection's first artwork by a Black woman.

The painting, called "Resurrection," is by Alma Thomas.

Woman: She was a trailblazer, and being able to see the influence that she has had in what some would call a nontraditional area, particularly for Black women artists, is inspiring.

♪ Curry: Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1891, Alma Thomas lived in surroundings her autobiography renders idyllic-- a Victorian house in a good neighborhood with circular flowerbeds later reflected in her paintings... ♪ but life in Georgia was difficult.

She wasn't able to go to the white school down the block.

She had to go to a Black school.

She can't go to school beyond elementary school.

She wants to learn.

She wants to make art.

♪ Woman: With the increased lynchings and anti-Black violence, her family really wanted to move to a place where she could have more promise, more possibility, more education, and so they relocate here to Washington, D.C., in 1907.

Curry: Washington, D.C., was strictly segregated at the time.

While the majority of Black Americans in Washington remained poorly resourced, the Thomas family's Logan Circle neighborhood teemed with members of a rising Black middle class.

Thomas enrolled in Armstrong Manual Training School, one of the few high schools that admitted Black students.

She wrote that when she entered the art room, she felt it was exactly where she belonged.

After graduating in 1911, Thomas chose teaching as the way to support herself, but she wanted to follow her artistic interests, which had turned to costume design.

She enrolled at Howard University for a career change.

She came to Howard to study, actually, in home economics, as what would then be considered a nontraditional student.

Curry: Thomas began designing costumes for Howard's theater department.

Her work caught the attention of Professor James Vernon Herring, founder of Howard's brand-new art department.

He became her mentor, and in 1924, Thomas became the art department's first graduate.

With no apparent path to becoming a professional artist, she started teaching at Shaw Junior High School.

In addition to teaching art, she introduced students to Black artists, organizing the first art gallery in D.C. public schools.

Harvey: Alma Thomas was a part of, I think, a era of educators that were directly engaged in what we call fugitive pedagogy now, things that would not have been important to a white conception of what African American education needed to be.

Curry: She also organized a series of lectures by Alonzo Aden, the curator of the Howard University's Gallery of Art.

Alonzo Aden was another protege of James Vernon Herring's.

In 1943, the 3 of them-- Herring, Thomas, and Aden-- would launch one of the nation's first commercial Black-owned art galleries-- the Barnett-Aden Gallery.

Unlike other art galleries at the time, artwork and guests of all races were welcome.

While teaching, Alma Thomas did not abandon her own artistic development.

Gaulke, voice-over: I taught for 35 years.

She taught for 35 years, but both of us were also doing our art the whole time.

You could give up.

You could be teaching, giving your energy to others, or you could create a community that's gonna support you in your own growth.

For Alma, a lot of who her community were were men--Jacob Kainen, David Driskell, Sam Gilliam.

It's finding those people that are gonna say, "You can do it."

Curry: In 1950, Thomas joined another interracial art endeavor called the Little Paris Group, founded by Howard University art professor Lois Mailou Jones.

In Jones' attic, members critiqued each other's artwork and prepared collective exhibits.

Thomas also started going to school at American University.

She was the wrong race, gender, and age to be taking studio art classes at American, yet she already knew several of her teachers, Robert Gates and Jacob Kainen, as artists who had exhibited at the Barnett-Aden Gallery.

At American, she began to transform her artistic style.

In an early assignment called "Joe Summerford's Still Life Study," she painted with perspective and realism.

By 1958, her "Etude in Brown: (Saint Cecilia at the Organ)" verged on the abstract.

She showed 3 pieces in the Little Paris Group's first exhibition in 1951.

By 1955, her work was in a group show at the Corcoran, a museum she said tried to keep her out as a teen in 1908.

By the time she turned to painting full time after she retired from teaching in 1960, she was a modern abstractionist.

[Crowd singing] She would paint only one more representational work, a depiction of the 1963 March on Washington.

A year later, at age 73, she invented the style that became her signature.

She credited this style, which she called Alma's stripes, to observing the light dapple through the leaves of the holly tree in her front yard.

Her first series, called "Earth Paintings," recalled the flower beds of her youth in Columbus, Georgia.

Her next series, inspired by the moon landing in 1969, were called the "Space Paintings."

Her work started to travel to universities, to small galleries, then museums.

In 1971, she got a solo show at the Whitney Museum in New York, one of the preeminent institutions of contemporary American art.

She was the first Black woman to do so.

When Thomas died in 1978, she was honored and celebrated across the nation, yet a decade later, she had mostly faded from view.

The exceptions: the art museum in her birthplace, the Columbus Museum in Georgia; and in Washington, D.C., where she worked on her art, on uplifting the community, and on integrating the art world.

Harvey: She really becomes a beacon for art students at the time, particularly at Howard University, to say, you know, "Our first graduate is able "to find not even local acclaim, but by the seventies, national acclaim."

Stevens: She set a standard.

It's a very high bar.

All of us, as artists, should be spending that time trying to make sure we're living up to the patterns that she established for us.

♪ The largest public collection of Alma Thomas' art resides at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, whose exhibition "Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas" is on view through June 2.

See americanart.si.edu for details.