She was born during the age of segregation and even at the tail end of Jim Crow.

She was the first black woman to have a solo presentation at the Whitney Museum.

I get more requests for Alma Thomas's work than any other artist.

I think 10 years before she passed is when she became famous.

That's kind of sad and wonderful all at the same time.

Alma Thomas was an elementary school teacher for 35 years in the Washington DC school system.

Upon her retirement, she became a painter, an artist who captures earth and space through magnificent strokes of color.

On her six foot tall canvases, she interprets the mysterious and invigorating language of color with love and intensity.

Alma Thomas through her youthful paintings, proves that one is as young as one's vision.

<i>[Thomas] I was born in Georgia in 1891</i> <i>in a section of Columbus called Rose Hill.</i> <i>Roses bloomed there almost year round.</i> <i>Two unusual circular flowerbeds</i> <i>are so deeply preserved in my subconscious,</i> <i>which found expression in my paintings.</i> <i>Also on the hillside were poplar trees.</i> <i>From there, I got music when the wind blew.</i> Thomas actually had somewhat of an unusual childhood in the sense that she grew up in a white neighborhood.

<i>The type of home that I lived in was a cultured type.</i> <i>My aunts had a white professor who used to come from Atlanta</i> <i>to teach them Latin, the classics and history.</i> <i>A friend taught painting.</i> <i>The beautiful colors of the paints fascinated me.</i> Columbus is segregated at the time.

So there's a separate school for blacks and a separate school for whites.

Even though there was a school two doors down, she had to travel by foot to the black school.

She graduates from ninth grade, and there's no more schooling available for her in that area.

<i>So my parents decided to move the family to Washington DC.</i> <i>At least the libraries there were open to Negroes.</i> <i>And another thing that was very disturbing to me,</i> <i>they had riots and lynchings in the South.</i> Alma Thomas is almost 16.

She and her mother and two sisters head to Washington, DC.

According to the family legend, the mom says "Take off your shoes and knock the Georgia dirt, knock it off of your shoes, like you're leaving the past behind and you're going to this new place."

<i> I could see the Washington Monument.</i> <i> It looked like we were going into paradise.</i> When she gets to Washington, she's in high school, she instantly gravitates towards art.

<i> When I entered the art room it was like entering heaven,</i> <i> a beautiful place, just where I belonged.</i> Alma Thomas enrolled at Howard University in her 30s.

She returns in some ways as a non-traditional student, right, having taught for a while and enters Howard University's program in home economics where she's thinking about theatrical design.

Her goal was to become a costume designer.

Howard University represented a mecca of education where African Americans were defining their engagement with American society but also their own identity as African Americans.

One of her professors was James Vernon Herring.

He sees how advanced she already is.

He convinces her that she should join the new Department of Art and she becomes the first graduate, the only Fine Arts graduate at Howard University in 1924.

So she is this trailblazer.

She paves the way for other students who followed.

<i>I was then employed at Shaw Junior High School.</i> <i>I taught for 35 years in that one room.</i> So one of her lessons, she covered the windows with butcher block paper and had the students draw on it, sort of making it like stained glass, and had the students focus on the world inside the classroom, sort of like her own childhood memory of the classroom as being like heaven, like she wanted this to be an almost holy place.

<i>And I was not just teaching children how to draw.</i> <i>I was teaching them an appreciation of beauty.</i> Alma Thomas becomes extremely interested in puppetry and marionettes.

She pursued a Master's in Education at Columbia University's Teachers College.

So the students would learn how to make and perform these marionettes.

But along the way, they would be learning history, language arts, color theory, and so on and so forth.

The story often is told that Thomas becomes an artist when she retires from teaching.

Often overlooked is that she was active as an artist for many years before she retired.

She has an exhibition history, and she was certainly known on the scene.

Her role as Vice President of Barnett Aden Gallery, perhaps the first Black-owned commercial art gallery in the country, was certainly groundbreaking in showing modern work in Washington and groundbreaking in showing art by white artists and black artists.

You know, she was very much in this kind of elite circle of the Washington art world, which was significant because New York and Paris were the centers.

So she had her own center of the art world that she was cultivating and participating in.

She is still in the classroom nine to five and then finding the time, energy and resources to attend courses at American at night and on the weekends.

<i> I studied painting at American University for 10 years.</i> <i> The students there were not painting realistically.</i> <i> I made up my mind that I was going to paint creatively too.</i> She was still at that point trying to find her own voice as a painter.

Going to American University was her entree into the Washington Color School clique.

She travels abroad, exploring the art centers of Europe but also cutting edge contemporary art.

And that seems to be one of the turning points for her where she really dedicates herself to an artistic career.

The house becomes important throughout Thomas's life.

When they broke the house up into apartments, my aunt Alma took the first floor and my aunt Maurice took the upstairs of the house.

Thomas's great nephew Charles comes to spend shorter and longer periods of time.

She was too strong willed to be anyone's wife.

My aunt Alma always said, <i> I am Miss Alma Thomas.

I am Miss for all the fools I missed.</i> Thomas devises her workspace as a combination kitchen and studio, a place where she could look out into the garden.

She loved to entertain.

She always liked modern furniture.

So she had this womb chair.

It was red, like an orangish red.

She had a bathroom that was Mamie Eisenhower pink.

It's also a place where artists come to visit.

She kept a very good well stocked bar.

She would invite these folks over to get constructive criticism about the many studies that she created or her latest canvas.

There's this transition story that she has this bout of arthritis.

She is at home and in bed.

And she literally thinks to herself that she isn't going to ever be able to paint again.

In 1965, she receives an invitation from Howard University, inviting her to create a new body of work.

I just imagine her one day looking out her window and then having like an epiphany.

She sees the holly tree in her front lawn and the light coming through.

And that gives her this idea to paint in this kind of tesserae or mosaic-like structure.

Because the leap from her traditional style to the gigantic, eye-popping pictures is so sudden.

She did not let her arthritis get in the way.

She would soak her hands in hot water to relieve the stiffness.

She's suffering and she's finding her way literally and metaphorically and certainly emotionally to the light.

Up until she was invited in the 60s to have a one woman show at Howard University, she had never painted in the style we know her for.

So she comes up with this broken brush mark, what she called Alma's Stripes, what we now think of as classic Alma Thomas.

The feedback she gets is incredibly good.

She realizes she's hit upon a format that has so many ways that can be explored.

It is very sensorially rich work that engages, sound and touch, as well as vision.

You know, you have a sense of wind moving through trees, the pattern of light and shadow sifting through foliage, the intense warmth of sunlight.

She's creating something full of life and full of energy.

And that seems to be where her real transition happens, where she focuses on the beauty and on the optimism rather than focusing on the darkness or the difficulty or the pain.

Thomas was 75, and she had really hit her stride.

She really turns out to be the first African-American woman and one of the first American women period to fully join a movement of abstraction.

Color field painting is all about shapes, large areas of color, the feelings and the emotions, and the moods that are affected by the way those things are put together.

But what Alma did was she took the idea of color field painting - large areas of color from the Washington Color School, and she combined that with the interest in brushstroke of the New York School.

So what you end up is these huge, eye dazzling mosaics.

Often the little marks of her paint, that might at first glance appear to be a single touch with the brush, is built up through multiple touches.

And that's how she's building variety and depth and luminosity.

Her work appears haphazard, but in fact, it's very calculated.

She's also thinking about how white light is comprised of all of these colors.

<i>Light is the mother of color.</i> <i>Light reveals the living soul of the whole universe</i> <i>through colors.</i> There are a lot of rainbows in her work.

Technology is a thread that runs through her career.

Alma Thomas's attendance at the 1934 World's Fair in Chicago is significant in terms of the themes that were emerging that she would later pursue in her abstract paintings.

So things like looking towards space.

<i>[NASA] ...Two, one, zero, all engine running.

Liftoff!

We have a liftoff.</i> <i>It appears to be very, very fine grained as you get close to it.</i> When she's working on the space paintings, she's listening to the astronauts as they're descending on the moon.

<i>One giant leap for mankind.</i> Thomas is envisioning space as not just a place where Americans can be, but where African Americans can be.

Thomas's solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972 is remarkable.

She is the first African American woman given a solo show at such an important institution.

That exhibition was what really put her on the map.

It led to gallery representation in New York, it led to several reviews of the project by the New York Times.

That fall the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC opens an even larger retrospective of Thomas's work.

</i>I visited the Corcoran in 1908.</i> <i>They did not want Negroes in there particularly,</i> <i>but I went in just the same.</i> <i>I was so interested in art.</i> <i>And now I'm allowed to exhibit there 64 years afterward.</i> The mayor declares September 8 that year Alma Thomas Day, and it's basically from that point on that she and her reputation skyrocket.

Alma Thomas was very aware of her public-ness, as I like to call it.

She was very aware of how she moved in the world as a woman, as an African American, as an artist.

She had a dress designer who, whenever she had an opening, designed something new for her to wear.

One iconic photograph is at the Whitney opening.

You see the kind of play with geometry and shape and composition in the dress, and then her artwork behind.

Alma Thomas represents the generation that precedes the Black Arts Movement generation, where she's still negotiating the respectability politics of the mid-twentieth century in Washington, DC.

<i>When they asked me if I considered myself a black artist,</i> <i>I said, "No, I'm a painter.

"</i> Her interests were not in necessarily a racial project or a gender empowerment project.

Even though she lived through those tumultuously political times, she didn't necessarily feel the need to paint it.

And she firmly believes in her heart about the universality of modernism, where everyone is equal.

<i>[singing] I do believe, we shall overcome someday.</i> Civil Rights was something that she was a very strong believer in.

She did go to the March on Washington.

In fact, she did a painting that the US Postage used as a stamp.

<i>Life is short.</i> <i>I knew starting at the age that I did,</i> <i>I couldn't do a whole lot of different things.</i> <i>I had to do one thing.</i> Late in life when she is suffering from many physical limitations, she's painting canvases that are much taller than she is.

There are stories about her wedging her body in between phone books, so she can sit upright.

She's determined to not compromise that vision of doing this large triptych.

And it was indeed like the centerpiece of her solo show that year at Martha Jackson Gallery.

I'd push her wheelchair so she could see.

She had lots of adoring fans, yes.

And Thomas is really almost forgotten until 2009.

This is the first look at this first modern room in the White House.

And we are so excited about the Alma Thomas piece, it's "Resurrection."

Alma Thomas is the first African American female artist to be shown here at the White House.

That attention from the Obamas really kick-started Thomas's reputation in the 21st century.

"Resurrection," which I believe they bought for around $300,000, that piece today would probably be close to $2 million.

I think my aunt would be just over the moon with that.

She inspires anyone to never stop doing what you love.

She's a renegade pushing the boundaries in ways that we continue to have to do.

I have looked at art from all over the world, and all through the ages.

And I have never seen anything like her paintings.

It's very difficult to be unique.

It's almost impossible.

But there you have her.

<i>When I was a child, we couldn't go into museums,</i> <i>let alone think of putting our pictures there.</i> <i>Times have changed.

Just look at me now.</i>