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Alma Woodsey Thomas
artist, Activist.
2025 Inductee, Georgia Women of Achievement

Alma Thomas_2020.18.12.jpg

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QUICK FACTS

 

Birth Date

September 22, 1891​

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Death Date

February 24, 1978​

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Induction Year

2025

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City, Town, Region

​Columbus, GA

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In 1890, John and Amelia (Cantey) Thomas became the first African American couple to own a home in Rose Hill, a northern suburb of Columbus. They lived on a small rise near both middle-class families and poor millworkers. Family lore and land deeds suggest that John Thomas built his Queen Anne style house with his white half-brother T. Woodsey Markham. Alma Woodsey Thomas was born in the home on September 22, 1891, followed by three sisters.

 

The Thomases remained the only nonwhite family in the neighborhood until they left Georgia. In a short autobiography, Alma Thomas recalled “lovely memories” of her childhood home. She singled out two circular flower beds on the property as being “so deeply preserved in [her] subconscious” that her paintings reflected their influence, decades after she had last seen them. The house also sat near a creek that included “some kind of acid that changed the clay to different colors,” perhaps chemical runoff from the area’s textile mills. Thomas took small cans to the creek and “put the separate colors in separate cans” to take them home for experiments.

 

Thomas completed the ninth grade, the highest grade available to African Americans in Columbus, at 6th Avenue School. In 1906, the Atlanta Race Massacre, which began on Thomas’s 15th birthday, resulted in the death and maiming of dozens of African Americans. Her uncle William Cantey spent one night locked in the Atlanta customs office where he worked, unable to return home. Amelia’s sister Sallie Cantey McDuffie, then living in Washington, D.C., presented the nation’s capital as a safer alternative with more educational opportunities for the Thomas girls. The family moved in July 1907.

 

John Thomas, once the sole proprietor of Columbus’s only Black-owned bar, took a job as sexton at neighboring St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. The importance of education and the respectability of teaching as a profession were modeled to Thomas at a young age by her family. After Thomas graduated from Armstrong Manual Training High School in 1911, she attended Miner Normal School, becoming certified as a kindergarten teacher. Thomas taught at the Thomas Garrett Settlement House in Wilmington, Delaware, from 1915 to 1921. This African American community center also hosted women’s suffrage meetings during Thomas’s tenure.

 

In 1921, Thomas returned to Washington to attend Howard University. Though she initially studied costume design, following in her mother’s footsteps as a dressmaker, artist and professor James V. Herring was so impressed by her sketches that he invited her to join the art department he had just created. Thomas became the university’s first fine arts graduate in 1924 and joined the faculty of Shaw Junior High School in January 1925, beginning a 35-year career.

 

As she taught art to generations of students, Thomas also pursued more esoteric interests, producing several marionette shows with students. Throughout her teaching career, Thomas continued her own education, earning a master’s degree in art education from Teachers College of Columbia University in 1934. From 1952 to 1957, she attended courses in art and art history at American University. She remained active in the D.C. art scene, serving as vice president of Barnett Aden Gallery, the first private commercial gallery in Washington to show artists regardless of race. She also interacted with many of the artists who known as part of the Washington Color School, such as Gene Davis, Sam Gilliam, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland.

 

In 1960, Thomas retired from teaching and began focusing on painting. She moved away from more figurative works in favor of Abstract Expressionism, which led to her signature broken brushwork. As Thomas was invited to participate in several solo and group exhibitions, she also kept working with neighborhood children through after-school activities. In 1962, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs placed her on its Honor Roll of Distinguished Women for her “outstanding achievement in club and community activities and fine arts.”

 

By 1969, the U.S. Department of State selected her work for its Art in Embassies program, allowing her canvases to be viewed by audiences worldwide. In 1971, curator, artist, and fellow Georgia native David C. Driskell of Fisk University organized a significant presentation of Thomas’s work in Nashville and recommended her to curators at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The following year, several newspapers, including The New York Times, reviewed Thomas’s landmark solo exhibition at the Whitney the first by an African American woman. D.C. Mayor Walter Washington declared September 8 “Alma W. Thomas Day” when her retrospective opened at the city’s Corcoran Gallery of Art.

 

Thomas’s star continued to rise as she kept making work and receiving recognition, such as the District of Columbia Teachers College Distinguished Alumni Award in 1973 and Howard University’s Alumni Achievement Award in 1975. She returned to Georgia in 1973 as an honored guest at The Columbus Museum, where her painting Springtime in Washington was featured in an exhibition of Washington artists. Though challenged by arthritis in the final years of her life, Thomas found ways to keep painting, increasing the scale of her work. She was still painting shortly before her death on February 24, 1978.

 

Today, Alma Thomas’s work can be found in major museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The Columbus Museum owns several paintings and sketches by Thomas, as well as an archive donated by Thomas’s youngest sister. In 2014, Thomas achieved a major posthumous milestone, becoming the first African American woman represented in the White House art collection. Soaring interest in her work resulted in a record auction sale of one canvas for $3.9 million in 2023. New audiences continue to discover Thomas, including through a 2021–22 traveling exhibition organized by The Columbus Museum and the Chrysler Museum of Art and a 2023–25 traveling exhibition organized by the Smithsonian Museum of American Art

@2016 by Georgia Women of Achievement

Georgia Women of Achievement, Inc
4760 Forsyth Road
Box 8249
Macon GA 31210
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