♪ Hi, everybody.

Welcome to "WETA Arts," the place to discover what's going on in the creative and performing arts in and around D.C.

This special edition is dedicated to Alma Thomas, an influential D.C. artist and beloved teacher, who overcame racial division and the subordinate role assigned to women artists in the early 20th century to reach national acclaim.

♪ We're opening up the Old Family Dining Room for the first time, and we just redesigned it with modern art.

Felicia Curry: 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 is called "Resurrection," an apt metaphor for D.C. artist Alma Thomas' renown once the work went public.

Thomas's work was celebrated for a decade before her death in 1978.

Then she fell into relative obscurity, until the White House's 2015 unveiling.

Since then, she has again been recognized nationwide.

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

Curry: In Washington, though, she's celebrated for even more, whether it was bringing the joy of art to generations of black students, fearlessly invading white enclaves to desegregate D.C. art spaces, or standing as a visible example of who a black woman could be, her story is a Washington story.

In Logan Circle, an African- American Heritage Trail marker indicates the house where Alma Thomas and her sister J. Maurice lived for most of their lives.

J. Maurice was a librarian, and it is because of her meticulous record-keeping, that we know a great deal about her celebrated sister's life.

She's left behind wonderful archival materials that are in the Smithsonian and the museum in Columbus.

Curry: Their archive contains everything from autobiographical essays and artist statements to ticket stubs and vacation photos.

And there is art, too-- sculptures, marionettes, and paintings.

It's the documentation of an artist navigating black-and-white worlds to pursue her love of color.

Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1891, Alma Thomas lived a racially integrated early childhood in surroundings her autobiography renders idyllic.

Woman as Alma: "I have lovely memories "of a Victorian type of house.

"Still fresh in my memory are the beautiful flower gardens "that we had.

"There were two unusual circular flower beds, "now deeply preserved in my subconscious, which find expression in my paintings."

"My father.

"He gave his soul to us.

"He looked Italian.

He had a white father.

"His white half-brother built houses.

That's how we got the house on Rose Hill."

Curry: Her mother's father, Winter Cantey, was the son of a plantation owner and an enslaved woman.

Woman as Alma: My mother and aunts were teachers and were graduates of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

I can remember their participation in cultural clubs, their study in Latin history and the classics.

A white professor from Atlanta came to our home once or twice a month to instruct them.

Curry: Despite Thomas' writings, the situation was not all rose beds and literary salons.

Through a series of lawsuits, her father went from being only one of two black saloon proprietors in town to being a bartender in the establishment he once owned.

Her mother was a seamstress.

And with 4 daughters, the finances were strained.

And then there was the schooling situation.

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 and she's pulling mud out of the river of different colors and making little plates.

Curry: In 1906, on Alma Thomas's 15th birthday, a white mob began killing dozens of black Americans and destroying black-owned businesses and neighborhoods in Atlanta.

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: The Thomas family became part of the Great Migration, the exodus of as many as 6 million black people from the American South to Northern and Midwestern states.

Woman as Alma: We took the streetcar at 6th and Pennsylvania Avenue and rode to 14th and Church, where we disembarked and walked one block South to 1530 15th Street.

Curry: Their house was in one of the sections of Washington in which black Americans were permitted to live.

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

We wouldn't get past Rhode Island Avenue, which was the southern border of where you could go.

16th Street.

If you did go pass it, you were stopped by police who'd say, "What is your business here?"

Why, you could not go downtown, unless you were a maintenance worker or that kind of thing.

Curry: In Georgia, the Thomases had straddled two worlds, black and white.

In Washington, officially, they could only live in one world.

Alma Thomas would spend her life using education and art to open doors, cross racial boundaries, and help others do the same.

While the majority of black Americans in Washington remained poorly educated and resourced, the Thomas family's neighborhood teamed with lawyers, doctors, architects, business owners, and other members of a rising black middle class.

The key to the middle class was education.

Thomas started at M Street High School.

It was an elite college preparatory school with academic, scientific, and business tracks.

J. Maurice Thomas, Alma's sister, recalls.

Woman as J.: Alma had no trouble at all in getting into the high school.

She didn't have to be, as they say, "put back."

She didn't like M Street because they didn't teach her what she wanted.

Curry: Thomas transferred to Armstrong Manual Training School.

It was the first of several times she charted her own educational path.

Woman as Alma: When I entered the art room, it was like entering Heaven.

A beautiful place, just where I belonged.

I took all the art courses as well as sewing, millinery, and cooking.

Curry: After graduating in 1911, Thomas was at a crossroads.

She needed to support herself independently, as she had declined an offer of marriage and indeed chose to never marry.

Gaulke: She said, "I am Miss Alma Thomas.

I am Miss for all the fools I missed."

And she loved saying that, but she knew that if she got married, that would probably be the end of her career, because there'd be a man in her life that she'd probably be cooking for and taking care of and dealing with, you know, all the ways that women are expected to support the men in their lives.

She made some choices that were very deliberate.

Curry: Thomas chose teaching as the way to support herself.

Woman as J.: Alma finished the Normal School, a 2-year course, which prepared one to teach either in the grades or Kindergarten.

Alma chose Kindergarten because she liked the art instruction.

Curry: However, she was unable to find a permanent position in D.C. and had to leave to find work.

Woman as J.: Her first position teaching was at Princess Anne, Maryland.

Her next position was at Cheyney Teacher Training School teaching art.

After a year or two at Cheyney, she received the position to run the Thomas Garrett Settlement House in Wilmington, Delaware.

Here, she supervised classes for children and adults, but these jobs did not provide the life Thomas wanted for herself.

She idealized Washington, D.C. and New York as meccas of cultural opportunities for black Americans, and she was far from the action.

She worried her teaching methods were becoming outdated and she wanted to follow new artistic interests.

Woman as Alma: There was no more of the old ways of teaching.

Now they use the Montessori method.

I told my mother, I would have to change my life.

At the same time, I had developed an interest in costume design.

Curry: She returned to Washington, D.C. almost 7 years after she left to start a career change by enrolling at Howard University.

She came to Howard to study, actually, in Home Economics-- as did I when I was a student here at Howard University-- enrolling in Howard, as what would then be considered and even now a non-traditional student.

Curry: 1921, when Thomas started at Howard, happened to coincide with the creation of The Howard Players, the first black student acting group in the country.

Thomas began designing their costumes.

Her designs caught the attention of Professor James Vernon Herring.

Woman as Alma: He asked me to be his student.

I was happy about it, though I had been out of school and teaching for 6 years.

But he said, "Don't worry.

I'll stick with you as long as you want me to."

So I did.

He became my mentor and took me under his wing.

He had beautiful books.

He would take the books and explain the artists to me.

And so I came to know the great artists.

Curry: There were many reasons for Thomas to feel a kinship with Herring.

Like Thomas' father, Herring had both a black and a white parent.

Like Thomas, he had moved to Washington, D.C. from the South for better educational opportunities.

And Herring used art to live in both black and white worlds.

He was an artist and an art scholar, with a Bachelor's degree from Syracuse and graduate work at Columbia and Harvard.

Within a year of being hired to teach the history of architecture, he had convinced Howard's president and Board of Trustees to establish an art department, which he would chair.

He laid the foundation for a Studio Art degree and persuaded Thomas to switch majors.

Thomas graduated from Herring's program in the spring of 1924, the first graduate of Howard's art department.

With no apparent path to becoming a professional artist, she applied to teach in D.C. public schools.

There was only one vacancy.

It went to playwright Frances Berkeley Brooks.

Thomas was back at Cheyney Training School for Teachers in Pennsylvania, when on November 20th she got a letter offering her the job with D.C. public schools.

The first-ranked candidate had died in the middle of the semester.

She rushed back to D.C. and started teaching at Shaw Junior High School.

She stayed 35 years.

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

She's extending those experiences that she had at Howard University as an art student to her students.

Woman as Alma: In the 1936, '37 school year, I organized a program called the School Arts League Project to foster a keener appreciation of art among Negro children of Washington, D.C.

I organized the first art gallery in the D.C. public schools in 1938, securing paintings by outstanding Negro artists from the Howard University Gallery of Art.

In connection with this program, a series of lectures by Alonzo Aden was playing, with emphasis on the art of the American Negro.

Curry: Like Thomas, Alonzo Aden was also a protege of James Vernon Herring.

When the Howard University Gallery of Art was established in 1928, Aden became its first curator.

Aden could give Shaw Junior High School students not only a history of black artists but an example of a career in art.

And the three of them-- Thomas, Herring, and Aden-- had plans for something even more unusual.

In 1943, they would launch the nation's first commercial black-owned art gallery on the first floor of Herring and Aden's row house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood near Howard University.

Unlike other art galleries at the time, artists of all races showed their work, and guests of all races were welcome.

For almost 20 years, she serves as Vice President of this organization.

We're talking about an early space in Washington, D.C., where arts were the conduit for interracial spaces, and Alma Thomas is part of that.

Curry: Thomas' interest took her to New York City during the summers, where she was the rare black person earning a Master's degree in teaching at Columbia University, Teachers College.

She also attended Marionette School in New York, taking 100 hours of classes on every aspect of marionette theater.

Her Master's thesis was on using marionettes as a pedagogical tool with her 9th graders at Shaw.

They learned everything from human proportions to soldering, teamwork to dress pattern making, and because it was Miss Thomas' class, they learned about color.

Woman as Alma: The pupils were allowed to experiment with color for their first problem.

After their experimentation, they could find the color complement and to apply design principles of spacing, dominance and subordination, and balance and rhythm in color arrangement.

Curry: Thomas' dedication to student enrichment extended outside Shaw Junior High School.

She sponsored dances at the YWCA.

She judged citywide arts competitions, but she did not abandon her own development.

Her interests turned from marionettes to painting.

Gaulke: I taught for 35 years.

She taught for 35 years.

But both of us were also doing our art the whole time that we were teaching.

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.

So, for me, it was a community of other feminist artists.

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

It doesn't really matter.

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

curry: Some of her community were artists whom she knew through the Barnett-Aden Gallery, as she became part of the Washington Color School, an art movement that grew from abstract expressionism and explored ways to use large solid areas of paint.

She joined another interracial art endeavor called the Little Paris Group, founded by Howard University art professor Lois Mailou Jones.

It met weekly in Jones' home in Brookland, a predominantly white neighborhood.

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

Thomas had also started going to school at American University, located in an all-white neighborhood.

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.

Woman as Alma: From 1950 to 1960, the Studio for Creative Painting at the American University released me from the limitations of the past and opened the door to creativity.

Curry: An early assignment called "Joe Summerford's Still Life Study" showed perspective and realism, but it hinted at what was to come--subtle variations and sharp contrasts of color.

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

Woman as Alma: Color is life.

Light is the mother of color.

Light reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors.

Curry: 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, did not allow her in as a teen In 1908.

Woman as Alma: I went in just the same, I was so interested in art.

Now I'm allowed to exhibit there 64 years after.

Curry: Thomas retired from Shaw Junior High School in 1960.

By the time she turned to painting full-time, she was a modern abstractionist.

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

A year after the March on Washington, at age 73, she created the style that became her signature.

Woman as Alma: In May 1964, I had a terrific attack of arthritis, and for several months I could not move around.

So I would gaze at how the light shone on and through the holly tree.

When I grew better I began making small sketches on what I had experienced in light and color.

My goal was not to offend the beauty in nature but rather to share with others those aspects of it that have given me so much joy, and that's how it all began.

The works have changed in many ways, but they are still all little dabs of paint that spread out very free.

So that tree changed my whole career, my whole way of thinking.

Curry: Her first series of works in this style were shown in 1966 at Howard University.

It was intended as a retrospective.

Instead, Thomas debuted her new style.

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.

♪ After the Howard Show, Thomas started being represented by the Franz Bader Gallery.

Every time she went to the gallery, she crossed 16th Street, the street that unofficially marked how far west a black Washingtonian should be.

Her work started to travel, to universities, to small galleries, then museums, first in group shows and then in solo shows across the nation.

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.

At the peak of her popularity, Thomas was artistically out of step with her times.

Her work reflected a modernist aesthetic that was cutting edge in the 1950s, but the cutting edge for black artists coming of age in the early seventies was the Black Arts movement.

The Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s emphasized racial pride, economic empowerment, and building institutions to champion black causes and cultures.

Part of the Black Power movement, the Black Arts movement, called for black artists to depict the reality of life as a black American and make explicit political commentary.

By definition, it was representational.

At the same time that Thomas' work was at the Whitney, activists, like the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, were protesting museums like the Whitney, demanding better representation.

To these protesters, Alma's signature stripes did not look like what the times demanded of a black artist.

To Thomas, the Black Arts movement seemed to miss the point.

Woman as Alma: In my opinion, "Black Art" is a misnomer.

There are black artists and they, like all others, draw from their experiences to produce artistic expressions.

Through color, I have sought to concentrate on the beauty and happiness in my painting, rather than on man's inhumanity to man.

I feel like black people must look beyond dashikis and afro hairdos for their identity.

Curry: One such artist was Akili Ron Anderson, who encountered Thomas in the early 1970s at the Corcoran Gallery.

He was installing one of his works for an upcoming show.

She was at the Corcoran being interviewed by a filmmaker.

As I was this black militant, all right, and I wanted to see fists raised in the air and black faces being paraded across an African savanna.

And here she was with these very elegant, color-sensitive flowers.

Coming up to me and saying, "Isn't this wonderful?"

about my work.

I said, "Well, I'm the artist."

And she grabbed the cinematographer at that point.

"Take this boy's picture.

You know, put him in the movie."

And whatever influence she may have had at the time, it was her intention, her love, that was overwhelming to me.

She helped me to feel like I belong in the whole picture, and that--that was--that has carried me up to this moment.

Curry: 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.

♪ Shiloah Symone Coley earned a degree in journalism with minors in art and African-American history without ever hearing of Alma Thomas.

She was amazed when, as a first-year graduate student at American University, a professor handed out a catalog of Alma Thomas' works.

I think that what blew me away more so the trajectory of this incredible career she ended up having later in her life, was her commitment to service and her work as a teacher in the D.C. public schools.

When I think about Alma Thomas, I just think about what would happen if we really valued artists beyond just their studio practice or showing work at the Whitney.

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."

She taught me subtlety, not just in the artwork but in personality.

What I learned from her is, "Let's work together."

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.

♪ Woman as Alma: My real belief is in my art, in beauty.

I say everyone on Earth should take note of the Spring of the year, coming back every year, blooming and gorgeous.

♪ You can see work by Alma Thomas at many museums and exhibit spaces in the D.C. area, the National Gallery of Art, the public library, the Phillips Collection, and more.

Go to our website for details at WETA.org/arts.

Here's a thought from Miss Alma Thomas.

"Light, that first phenomenon of the world, "reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors."

Thank you for watching "WETA Arts."

Be well, be creative, and enjoy the art all around you.

I'm Felicia Curry.

Announcer: For more about the artist and institutions featured in this episode, go to WETA.org/arts.

♪