Alma W. Thomas

To tell the story of Alma Woodsey Thomas, whom we now think of as artist, one might begin with the last eighteen years of her life, from the year of her retirement from teaching art at Shaw Junior High School of Washington, DC, in 1960, to her death in 1978. Not that her earlier years had little or nothing to do with her artistic productions from 1960 onward—quite the contrary, those years, as well as her youth and young adult life, had everything to do with the formation of her aesthetic sensibility, and the feeding of her imaginary and her intellect, along with disciplined practice as a painter. Her formal art education at American University and Howard University, where she was the first graduate of the Art Department, combined with her informal intellectual and aesthetic exchanges with the Little Paris Group and the Washington Color school, were paramount to her development as an artist. Her helping to plan and mount the various art exhibitions, as well as her participation in open discussions, at the Barnett-Aden Gallery were paramount to her development as a curator and arts administrator. But it is the paintings that she produced during those last eighteen years of her life for which she will be long remembered.